Glisser
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Glisser was a London-based event-technology company founded in 2014 by Michael Piddock. It built an award-winning platform for virtual and hybrid meetings and events, offering interactive audience-engagement tools — live Q&A, polls, feedback and analytics — plus SDKs that let customers embed virtual-event components in their own websites and 3D environments. It raised just over $1 million of venture capital.
02 / Glisser FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Glisser rode the pandemic virtual-events boom, but live events' return collapsed demand and the business ran out of road in a tough funding climate. In January 2023 founder Michael Piddock announced administration, leaving ~25 employees jobless. A buyer took the platform but not the business — the pandemic-eraser pattern: a COVID tailwind reversing into a headwind faster than the burn could adjust.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Asset restructuring
founder Michael Piddock LinkedIn said Glisser would slip into administration the next week; found a buyer for the platform but not the broader business; prioritized jobs for ~25 staff.
- Asset restructuring
London Gazette notice 4285963: High Court CR-2023-000808; Glisser Ltd (08870844) administrators Carl Derek Faulds and Stewart Goldsmith of Leonard Curtis appointed 13 Feb 2023.
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
Virtual/hybrid events platform; interactive engagement tools
- 02
Pandemic demand surge, then live events return
- 03
Out of cash; administration announced Jan 2023
- 04
Platform sold, broader business closed; 25 jobs lost