Blippar a technology company specialises in Augmented Reality and Computer Vision has announced that they are entering into administration right after recently raising more than $130 million in venture funding from investors like Qualcomm and Candy Ventures. Not only that “As part of the administration process, all employees will be let go,” said the official blog post.
Over the last several months, the whole team at Blippar has focused the business on their B2B offering in order to reach profitability and deliver long-term value to shareholders. This strategy had been approved unanimously by their board and required a small amount of funding, in addition to the funding announced in September, to fulfil their plans. That funding was secured, but it ultimately required shareholders’ approval for Blippar to access it.
“Regrettably, one shareholder voted against the additional funding, effectively blocking the investment even if they were not asked to participate in any further financing of the business, and despite their extensive efforts to reach a successful,” expressed the post reflecting on how the $5 million fund flow was blocked by Malaysian government a strategic investment firm Khazanah; which leads Blippar to close down.
The company entered the market in 2011, has gone through a number of trends in the augmented reality space, including Magnum Web AR project, Kelloggs Coco Pops Interactive project and more. Unfortunately, as the bar of the competition rose up the tech giants investing in AR couldn’t boost its revenues and started losing money for the quest of new customers. And hereafter Blippar’s services will likely to come to halt once the administrators take control of the business and its servers.