Cana, the company which was building an appliance that they claimed could create and customize virtually any beverage, shut down last week, The Spoon has learned.
According to numerous Linkedin posts from previous employees, the company could not secure funding and laid off all of its employees last week. Cana, which had raised $30 million in January last year, promised to have the product ready to ship sometime this year. But despite having a working prototype and brand partners in place, Cana could not raise the “funding necessary to build a production line for manufacturing and shipping devices.”
The news comes just two months after the company brought on none other than Sir Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame to be a brand ambassador, a hail mary move that didn’t work out.
Like many startups nowadays, Cana found the drastically reshaped funding environment just too difficult to survive. Consumer hardware startups have had a particularly tough time in recent years, and Cana’s climb was made even more difficult given the task of developing and building a consumables production infrastructure.
The Cana vision of a make-anything drink machine always seemed a bit too good to be true, so it’s a bummer we’ll never see if they could have made it work if they had gotten more funding.
They do not need any funding for creating a production line, they just need to find the right partner for it… like majority of brands…in same way that for example from Nvidia does not produce a single chip of graphic cards… they just develop the idea and some partners will produce for them at competitive cost.
So…. it’s a bad excuse for closing the doors… 30 millions went to smoke and 3 millions was enough to develop such machine… someone filled the pockets with funded money from others, at no surprise… when I have seen the announcement one year ago, I said to myself…that machine will not see the light of the day… sadly I was correct… too many years in this field already…