Israeli startup KnockaTV looks to be in serious trouble. If this article in the Globes is correct, 21 employees went without salaries in January and the company is ₪1.2 million in debt (about $300,000).
We first wrote about KnockaTV, which was founded by the same team who founded Mirabilis (ICQ), in August 2007 (Mirabilis was sold to AOL in 1998 for $407 million). They went into private beta in December 2007. The company raised at least $1 million in seed funding (the Globes article says they’ve raised $3.6 million in total). Update: the company is telling us they raised a total of $3.5 million, half from Evergreen, half from the rest. CrunchBase updated.
The founders have a lot of personal capital at their disposal, and it seems unlikely they’d let employees go unpaid. Still, the unpaid employees have supposedly petitioned the Tel Aviv District Court to appoint a provisional liquidator to the company.
I’ve emailed the company for a comment. For now, KnockaTV goes into the TechCrunch DeadPool.