A productivity tool founded during COVID-19 has entered liquidation.
London-based Dala Technologies is a contextual search tool backed with $1.4 million funding from Seedcamp and several prominent angels.
Sarah Cook and Miles Needham of FRP Advisory Trading were appointed joint liquidators earlier this week.
Haroun Hickman and Joel Kang founded the business at the start of 2021 out of a shared frustration with the fragmented nature of the tools they used in their daily workflow.
鈥淸During COVID] the two of us quickly found ourselves in meeting after meeting; our complementary skill sets meant that one would require the other for constant, but never sufficient, support,鈥� wrote Kang (pictured, left) at the time of the funding round.
Backers included Valia Ventures, Johnny Boufarhat – founder & CEO at Hopin, since broken up and sold off – Personio co-founder Roman Schumacher and James Meekings, co-founder & CMO at Funding Circle.
Kang continued: 鈥淲e groused about how difficult it was to constantly stay up to date with all the things that were going on, which then quickly turned into a philosophical musing: why do we need meetings in the first place?
鈥淧eople are in meetings typically to gain and share context – context that is missing because knowledge is fragmented, people are distributed, and communication is hard.
鈥淭he proliferation of SaaS tools that knowledge workers use means that a Slack question quickly becomes a Zoom meeting, the notes of which are taken in Google Docs, and the accompanying documentation later updated in Confluence.
鈥淚nstead of doing our best work, we are spending more time trying to organise, and then find the information we need to do our jobs. When that search yields no results, we鈥檙e confronted with the familiar anxiety of either bothering a busy coworker again, or venturing to connect the dots with incomplete context.鈥�
A statement from the liquidators read: 鈥淭he winding up is a members鈥� voluntary winding up and it is anticipated that all debts will be paid.鈥�
老九品茶Cloud has contacted the founders and investors for comment.
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