INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
After taking tens of thousands of crowd-funding pre-orders for a high-end pair of &3D sound& headphones, audio startup Ossic announced this
weekend that it is shutting down the company and backers will not be receiving refunds.
The company raised $2.7 million on Kickstarter and
$3.2 million on Indiegogo for their Ossic X headphones which they pitched as a pair of high-end head-tracking headphones that would be
perfect for listening to 3D audio, especially in a VR environment
While the company also raised a &substantial seed investment,& in a letter on the Ossic website, the company blamed the slow adoption of
virtual reality alongside their crowdfunding campaign stretch goals which bogged down their RD team.
&This was obviously not our desired
The team worked exceptionally hard and created a production-ready product that is a technological and performance breakthrough
To fail at the 5 yard-line is a tragedy
We are extremely sorry that we cannot deliver your product and want you to know that the team has done everything possible including
investing our own savings and working without salary to exhaust all possibilities.&
We have reached out to the company for additional
details.
Through January 2017, the San Diego company had received more than 22,000 pre-orders for their Ossic X headphones
This past January, Ossic announced that they had shipped out the first units to the 80 backers in their $999 developer tier headphones
In that same update, the company said they would enter &mass production& by late spring 2018.
In the end, after tens of thousands of
pre-orders, Ossic only built 250 pairs of headphones and only shipped a few dozen to Kickstarter backers.
Crowdfunding campaign failures for
hardware products are rarely shocking, but often the collapse comes from the company not being able to acquire additional funding from
Here, Ossic appears to have been misguided from the start and even with nearly $6 million in crowdfunding and seed funding, which they said
nearly matched that number, they were left unable to begin large-scale manufacturing
The company said in their letter, that it would likely take more than $2 million in additional funding to deliver the existing backlog of
pre-orders.
Backers are understandably quite upset about not receiving their headphones
A group of over 1,200 Facebook users have joined a recently-createdpage threatening a class action lawsuit against the team.
