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.
the team behind ICQ was so successful, its sad to hear their new startup to go this bad. ICQ was a start back those days, actually its still dominant instant messenger in all post Soviet Republics but globally and especially in US market it lost its share.
Those guys sold ICQ for 407mln, they have enough money to pay workers the salary, what is this letting go home with no salary?
anyone at Knocka reading this, I’ll buy your membership list.
This email address valid for 7 days only
nydolodabijatima@tempomail.fr
payment by paypal, e-gold or various others
If you’ll drop Dim Dave’s Email address in the next 7 days Ill double it
KnockaTV May Be Heading To The DeadPool - No Knocker here…
May be a little ahead of their time. Sounds similar to Seesmic, which based on Loic’s videos seems to be doing really well.
http://www.i-guide.ro
I agree with @1 RE Economist.
How in the HELL do you sell a company for $407M and go without paying your loyal employees. Of course the two founders didn’t make the entire $407M but I’m sure they took down 7 or 8 figures.
What the f*ck is wrong with these people! GREED, GREED and GREED!!!
–assuming the story is correct above–
I was working for a web 2.0 startup too, which was also covered by TC around 1 half of last year. The company had closed down and the salary for Dec 07 and Jan 08 haven’t been paid yet. Just wondering why it’s not in the DeadPool yet.
I wonder why you need to spend so much money on a crappy site like that. Its basically a mashup from youtube, how can you spend so much money on it, I’ve no clue.
I remember liking Knocka.tv but I also remember stumbling upon their about page and saw about 30 pictures of their employees.
I couldn’t believe they had so many on an unproven early-released version of a product. I just assumed they had enough VC to back it up, but I guess not.
Don’t trust a company who’s executives won’t put their own money behind it.
a liitle trigger happy Mike?
Triple the membership list offer. Haha, jp.
i for one would be happy to see it join the deadpool. i had an invite several months back, and checked it several times since. it was one of the most visually irritating sites i have ever been to, not to mention highly uninteresting content with a crappy interace.
As an unrelated comment, got a livestation invite yesterday, the app rocks. great video and sound quality, with no lags at all. hoping to see a TC article on this soon.