Berg UK
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
This record covers the same company as 'Berg' in this batch: BERG (British Experimental Rocket Group), the London design consultancy founded in 2005 by Matt Webb, famous for the Little Printer - a web-connected thermal mini-printer that produced a personalised 'newspaper' of news, birthdays and social updates - and for its Berg Cloud platform, pitched as 'cloud services for hardware innovators' to turn any dumb product into a smart one.
02 / Berg UK FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Same root cause as documented for 'Berg' in this batch: co-founder Matt Webb stated they had 'not reached a sustainable business in connected products'. The Little Printer delighted the public but could not fund a company; the Berg Cloud platform business needed a platform's runway (developers, partners, time) that the £800,000 raised in 2013 could not buy, and a small studio was fighting Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft over IoT infrastructure while the market was barely forming. The company wound down in September 2014, keeping Little Printer alive until March 2015 in hope of a sale or open-source release.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Product or service closed
VentureBeat (9 September 2014) reports London IoT studio Berg announced it had not reached a sustainable business in connected products and would shut down after nine years, keeping a skeleton crew so Little Printer could run until March 2015.
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
Same company as 'Berg' in this batch: delight is not a business model, and a £800K round cannot build a platform.
- 02
See the 'Berg' record for the full account and lessons.