Tintri
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Tintri was a Santa Clara data-storage company founded in 2008 by former VMware engineering chief Kieran Harty. Its flagship VMstore systems were purpose-built storage for virtualized data centers: instead of conventional storage abstractions, the software managed virtual machines and virtual disks directly, with per-VM quality-of-service controls. The company went public on NASDAQ in June 2017 and, a year later, was bought out of bankruptcy by DataDirect Networks.
02 / Tintri FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Tintri burned through its IPO proceeds at an alarming rate. The 2017 offering was delayed and priced below its original range; within a year revenue crashed 29 percent in a single quarter and the share price collapsed from over $7 to about $0.20, leading to NASDAQ delisting. A search for a buyer failed, forcing an 80 percent staff cut in June 2018, and the company filed for Chapter 11 protection the following month.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded
Kieran Harty, former VMware executive vice president of engineering, founds Tintri to solve the mismatch between conventional storage and virtual-machine workloads.
- First products
Tintri ships its first VM-aware storage products in April 2011; early venture rounds raise about $17 million, followed by $25 million in 2012.
- Late-stage funding
The company raises $75 million led by Insight Venture Partners in 2014 and $125 million led by Silver Lake Kraftwerk in 2015.
- IPO
Tintri lists on NASDAQ under the symbol TNTR on June 30, 2017, after a delayed and down-priced offering.
- Collapse
After failing to find a buyer, the board cuts about 200 of 250 employees in June 2018 as cash runs out; the stock is delisted from NASDAQ on July 9.
- Bankruptcy and sale
Tintri files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 10, 2018; DataDirect Networks completes a $60 million acquisition of substantially all its assets on September 4, 2018, and continues Tintri as a separate division.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Tintri filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on July 10, 2018, after running out of cash and failing to find a buyer.
- 02
DataDirect Networks agreed to acquire substantially all of Tintri's assets out of bankruptcy and completed the $60 million acquisition on September 4, 2018.
- 03
Tintri continued as a separate division of DDN, branded 'Tintri by DDN', keeping its 1,600-customer installed base supported with its own sales, support and engineering teams.