Busted Tech

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Speaking of tech, Quixey, a "pioneer" of deep mobile search, announced in an epically hubristic blog post that it is shutting down and exploring strategic options (read: IP sale in bankruptcy, most likely). It has $31mm of venture debt and $134mm of venture capital from the likes of Alibaba and Softbank scattered on the cap table. On the topic of venture debt, choice quote from Fred Wilson taken from here: "I have lived [the venture debt] story several times in my career and we are seeing this play out again in the market." Sure sounds like it. We've surveyed a number of restructuring professionals and there seems to be very little attention given to busted tech. Well, maybe other than from us. Why? No debt, we're told. Really? No debt? See, e.g., Violin Memory, Answers.com, Aspect Software. And, now also, some Soundcloud news - a company we have previously identified as a potential bankruptcy candidate. The company appears to have secured an additional $70mm of venture debt (additive to the $30mm previously raised from Tennenbaum Capital Partners) from the likes of Ares Capital, among others. Something tells us that Houlihan Lokey isn't in the business of making nonsensical and useless acquisitions. Interested in this subject? Email us.

A Call to Action

Last week we complained about a dearth of bankruptcy filings. This week we got a handful of cases: two retail, one healthcare, one oil-and-gas servicer, and two "tech" companies. Because this week's case summaries (see below) are longer than usual, we'll rest on those laurels in lieu of a substantive feature (you can find the summaries here: Answers Holdings Inc., California Proton Treatment Center, Vanity Shop of Grand Forks Inc., BCBG Max Azaria Global Holdings LLC, EMAS Chiyoda Subsea Limited, Lily Robotics Inc.). Gotta keep things tight, time-wise, you know? Trying to keep the time you're billing clients to read our kicka$$ newsletter down to 0.1 hours. 

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