I’ve been debating on writing this post, mainly because I have put a lot of effort into the company and I didn’t want to accept the news I received late last week. On the 16th of December I received this email:
Dear John:
We regret to inform you that due to our inability to secure our next round of funding, along with our difficulty finding an acquisition partner, Matisse Networks had to make the very difficult decision to cease operations as of the end of business yesterday, 12/15/09.
If you need further clarification, please do not hesitate to contact me at my office number or personal e-mail.
It has been our sincere pleasure working with you and your team.
For the last 6 months I have been hard at work trying to find metro-core projects who need the type of high-end bandwidth management that Matisse had to offer. The product is solid, the software is fantastic, the need is there but the money just ran out.
We were made aware of the potential issues in November and we were asked to augment our role as Market Developers and also try to find business partners for Matisse. We then started assisting Matisse in securing funds and we even had advanced talks with one Venture Capital firm in Germany who were so interested they flew out their Technology Specialists to do an initial technology assessment of the company.
Then we received the above letter from their Executive Team. Soon afterwards I got a call from my contact at the Venture Capital firm in Germany who said,
“What is going on with Matisse, I just got a strange email from them”
Apparently the Venture firm was weeks away from term sheets. Bad timing…..
