Edgeio To Shut Down – In The DeadPool

Edgeio, a company I co-founded in 2005, had a final board meeting this evening and made the decision to shut down operations of the company. We are putting it into the TechCrunch DeadPool.

Edgieo first launched in February 2006 after a beta period. The company raised a small angel round of financing, then in October 2006 closed a $5 million Series A from Intel Capital and Transcosmos.

The company burned through that money according to plan, meaning they ran out this month. The product roadmap was fulfilled, meaning development lags didn’t hurt the company. But the revenues didn’t come in and user/partner milestones weren’t met. And that meant no one else was going to put more money into the company.

For the last few months CEO Keith Teare has been working on a number of plans to keep the company going, but none of them panned out. So tonight the board decided, appropriately, to shut the company down. This will be orderly – employees will be let go but will be fully paid. In this job climate, all of them will hopefully find work very quickly.

I’m obviously sad about this since I was one of the founders, although my involvement for the last two years has been as a board member only. But this is the way the startup world works. You win some, but you lose most. Edgeio wasn’t meant to be a success. And now Keith and the rest of the team can start the fight over again, and hopefully next time they’ll come out winners.

On a side note, our job site, which is run by Edgeio, will be transitioning over in the next day or two.