CubeSensors has had an amazing 4 years. Unfortunately all good things come to an end. We’ve created an original and innovative solution to monitor ambient environment and quantify it. The original device was announced at the Launch Festival in 2013, where we won Best Hardware award and launched at TechCrunch Disrupt Hardware Battlefield 2014, where we also won. We have customers in over 50 countries around the world and have processed billions of data points.

In the years where many crowdfunded devices failed to ship, we were able to design, manufacture and ship our devices on a bootstrap budget. All in all CubeSensors run on about 700k USD of investment for about 3 years. However even with high demand, successful product and proof of traction, we were not able to secure enough financing to increase our working capital to a meaningful level. That meant that we were forced to do minimal batch runs financed by prepayments, which in the worst case meant a waiting queue that was about 5 months long.

We started when online services for IoT devices were not mature enough. So we had to build a whole stack needed to run a large number of distributed devices. We’ve felt that it’s important to have complete control over experience and reliability of the service. We’re proud of our achievement since we’re one of the few teams of the world that went through the whole process while building all the necessary tools along the way. CubeSensors team size never exceeded 8, while taking care of industrial design, engineering, manufacturing, software, distribution, ops and everything else. We’ve even build the next generation of the product, Koto. However we were never able to build a batch for the initial run, due to lack of working capital.

That’s why we’ve decided to close CubeSensors. We’re not going sell any new devices. The assets of the service were sold to a new and exciting product called Klevio (klevio.com). It’s a new project where some of the CubeSensors team members will also contribute to in the future.

There is one more thing that we feel it’s important. Far to many times we see successful startup products wind down for commercial reasons. While we understand the business logic behind it, we want to make a different precedent for all other startups that hit a commercial roadblock while still having loyal community of supporters. We don’t want to let our customers down. We’ve made sure that existing CubeSensors will run for a foreseeable future, keeping the service and support live. That will enable our devices to keep bringing data and insights to our users.

It was an emotional and exciting journey. Now it ends so a new one can begin.

Ales and Marko, cofounders