Berg
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Berg supplied cloud services for connected hardware, including the Little Printer device that printed online content.
02 / Berg FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Berg's own verdict, from co-founder Matt Webb: 'We've not reached a sustainable business in connected products.' The studio - one of the stars of London's Tech City, behind the beloved Little Printer - never found a business model that paid for the engineering. Its charming 2012 mini-printer proved the Internet of Things could be delightful, but it was the cloud service behind it, Berg Cloud, that had to carry the revenue: a turnkey platform meant to let any manufacturer turn a dumb product smart. That put a small studio in a fight with giants - Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, plus nimble rivals like SmartThings - while its IoT market was still barely forming. The £800,000 venture round raised in 2013 to push Little Printer and Berg Cloud onto the market was not enough runway to build a platform business from scratch: platform businesses need developers, partners and time, all of which a 9-year-old studio burned fast. In the end Berg excelled at one thing - making the future visible, charming and physical - and struggled at the other, the subscription economics that would have kept the lights on. It wound down in September 2014, keeping a skeleton crew until March 2015 to maintain Little Printer, hoping to sell it or open-source it.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
The retained source record identifies the company as having ended operations; the exact event details remain unverified.
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
Delight is not a business model: Little Printer won awards but could not fund a company.
- 02
Platform bets need platform runway: £800K is too little to build developer ecosystems and wait out a market.
- 03
Know who you are fighting: a 9-person studio cannot out-build Amazon, Google and Apple in cloud infrastructure.
- 04
Revenue has to come before the showcase: prototypes for giants like Google and Intel made Berg famous but did not pay for connected-product R&D.
- 05
Wind down gracefully: Berg kept Little Printer alive for six months and planned to open-source it - users deserved that care.