Five years after it was founded, and after raising $37.5 million, startup EverythingMe, which developed a launcher for Android devices, announced it was closing down and laying off dozens of employees. CEO Rami Kasterstein, CTO Joey Simhon, and Ami Ben David founded the company in 2010 under the name DoAT Media. Kasterstein and Ben David are former employees of Aladdin Knowledge Systems.
EverythingMe had a respectable list of investors, including Spanish giant Telefonica, Singapore telecommunications company Singtel, Firefox browser maker Mozilla, Li Ka-shing's Horizon Ventures, BRM Capital (controlled by the Barkat brothers), DFJ Tamir Fishman Ventures Ltd. (TASE: TFVC), and others.
The signs of problems in the company began early this year, when reports indicated that the company was laying off 20 employees, some of them from its content department. The company is now laying off its remaining 36 employees. The unofficial reason why the company is closing down is its inability to consolidate a business model for the development of an Android launcher in a rather competitive market.
The three company founders initially went in a different direction, before deciding to developing a launcher that would accommodate a completely different interface on the Android device. The original idea was a search of applications and the Internet, the results of which are displayed as icons of the relevant content, such as Wikipedia, IMDB, YouTube, etc., instead of an ordinary list of links. The company launched its product in the Disrupt competition of the TechCrunch popular technology blog, but since then replaced its name and the model it offered.
No response from the company was available.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on October 25, 2015
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