Lumoid, an e-commerce startup that rented out cameras, drones and fitness trackers, and which recently inked a partnership with Best Buy, has shut down, the company’s founder announced in a Facebook post.
The startup that was supposed to help Best Buy offer gadget rentals has shut down
Lumoid is closing its doors after four-and-a-half years.
Lumoid
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
The startup graduated from the Y Combinator incubator program in 2013 and went on to raise a few million dollars in venture capital and another $1 million in venture debt. But it appears that the company was recently unable to raise the additional funds it needed to survive, despite the partnership with the big-box retailer.
“Over the last four months, we gradually wound down Lumoid, sold off assets and IP, and helped the team transition as best as we could,” the founder and CEO Aarthi Ramamurthy wrote in the post, where she also announced she was joining Facebook to work on its payments team.
The turn of events is a bit of a surprise considering that Lumoid signed a deal in late spring to help Best Buy test out rental offerings for gadgets like cameras and fitness trackers.
Best Buy provided Lumoid with some of its “open-box” inventory — products that have been returned by customers but were in good condition — to use as rental devices. The big-box retailer was supposed to start advertising the rental service on its site in late June and send shoppers to Lumoid to complete the transaction.
It looks like that never happened.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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