Nitrous.io
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Nitrous.io was a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that let software developers code, configure, and share development environments from a remote server — skipping the tedious setup of local machines. Founded in 2012 in San Francisco and Singapore (originally as Action.IO) by AJ Solimine, Arun Thampi, and Peter Jihoon Kim, it raised $7.65 million in total, including a $6.65 million Series A in 2014 led by Bessemer Venture Partners with investors including Draper Associates, 500 Startups, and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. On October 31, 2016, the company announced it would shut down its service on November 14, 2016.
02 / Nitrous.io FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
No official cause of the shutdown was ever disclosed — the announcement caught customers by surprise and the company went quiet afterward. Nothing major had shipped since a new pricing model in April 2016, and a 2015 push to win professional developers had not gained traction, leaving the company to run out of money. More broadly, cloud IDEs struggled to become the norm: developers proved unenthusiastic about hosted environments, raising concerns about responsiveness, control, network dependence, and provider longevity, while desktop tools remained entrenched.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded
Action.IO was founded by AJ Solimine, Arun Thampi, and Peter Jihoon Kim to simplify creating and sharing development environments; it rebranded to Nitrous.IO and raised $1M seed led by Bessemer.
- Series A
Nitrous.io raised a $6.65 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing total funding to $7.65 million.
- Shut down
On October 31, 2016, Nitrous.io announced it would shut down its cloud development platform on November 14, 2016, closing new signups, refunding recent payments, and promising an open-source Nitrous Solo IDE.
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
On October 31, 2016, Nitrous.io announced in its newsletter and blog that it would shut down the Nitrous Development Platform and Cloud IDE on November 14, 2016.
- 02
The service closed for new signups immediately; payments made after October 16 were refunded, existing users were emailed links to download their data (deleted after 15 days), and the team promised to release an open-source version, Nitrous Solo.