In another high-profile failure of a successfully-crowdfunded gadget, it turns out that TechJect's robot dragonflies won't be flying their way to pledgers' pockets any time soon.
The company raised more than $1.1m in pledges on in 2012 on a campaign asking for $110,000, but recently admitted that it is in financial trouble. It claims that payment processor PayPal and its funding platform, Indiegogo, refused to release funds.
Techcrunch's Matt Burns explains that it's becoming a trend.
It seems TechJect failed to even fully develop the Robot Dragonfly even though the project hit first hit Indiegogo nearly three years ago. The Indiegogo project page states the developement had begun (in at least 2012) on a $1m grant from the US Air Force. “We don’t want users to wait for technology to trickle down,” the page says. Yet backers are still waiting.…
The Robotic Dragonfly always seemed a bit far-fetched. We covered the campaign after visiting the Georgia Tech labs where the project was born. But good engineers do not always make good founders. It takes a special team to see a product from CAD drawings to prototypes to store shelves.
