| ▲ | LeonM 4 hours ago |
| The title makes it sound like they just did a seed round, but the seed round was announced in August of last year [0]. Their website landing page is now also showing the software is no longer maintained. No mention of why they made this decision, my best guess is they burned through their seed money and were unable to attract further investments. [0]: https://www.tensorzero.com/blog/tensorzero-raises-7-3m-seed-... |
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| ▲ | pnw 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The company was started in January 2024, so the seed financing is likely a roll-up of two years of fundraising. $7m for ~30 months of running an AI startup in NYC is not that unusual. |
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| ▲ | RobotToaster 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Burning through $7m in 9 months? That's an impressive amount of avocado toast. |
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| ▲ | rfgplk 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | $7m actually isn't a whole lot, especially if they hired a (larger) engineering team. Assuming their cali based, that's easily 150-200k per engineer, a team of 20 easily eats through that. Idk the specifics, but I don't the organization was fradulent, it could also be that they're going commercial and no longer want to maintain their oss stack | | |
| ▲ | wtfleming 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 150-200k is also just the employee’s salary, the actual cost to the company is significantly higher, you need to multiply that by something like 1.5 to get the fully loaded cost, people are expensive! | |
| ▲ | DiggyJohnson 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 20 engineers would be incredibly aggressive growth for such a young company with that amount of capital, no? | | |
| ▲ | SR2Z 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The real number is probably closer to ~13 engineers, because it costs a company the worker's salary _again_ for benefits, payroll taxes, etc., etc. | | |
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| ▲ | j45 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Tokenmaxxing makes startups even leakier if they don't find token traction. | |
| ▲ | vips7L 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I thought ai was writing all the code. What do they need engineers for? | |
| ▲ | whateveracct 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | if you hire 20 engineers with your seed round you are either very confident you'll be able to use them to justify another raise soon or you're incompetent | | |
| ▲ | swiftcoder 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > very confident you'll be able to use them to justify another raise soon That is indeed how the VC funding game is played. If you don't raise another round, you are dead anyway, so you spend down your seed round to try and justify that following round... |
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| ▲ | GabrielBianconi 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We raised in 2024 and only burned through ~$3m of it, mostly on salaries to support a small team. | |
| ▲ | yett 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And AI tokens | | | |
| ▲ | raverbashing 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Those Claude tokens are not cheap you know /s |
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| ▲ | hoppp 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The project was probably just built to raise funds, a bait, and after thats done it's dead. |
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| ▲ | jnovek 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Were the thousands of commits and hundreds of feature branches over the last 9 months just to keep up appearances, then? Were the 850 people who forked it in on the scheme, too? | | |
| ▲ | pqtyw 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Well.. if that's it it's not really much to shown for if you spent $7 million on it. | | |
| ▲ | dpkirchner 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's not even clear they spent all the money. Maybe it just wasn't a viable product. | | |
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| ▲ | armchairhacker 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Did Claude make the commits and branches? (Honestly I don’t think so here, but I predict that will happen eventually) |
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| ▲ | Blackthorn 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Sometimes things just fail. | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | realsarm 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You can call it a bait but where is VCs due diligence for this. Most VCs where out there defending their infra layers investment. Just look at YC batches and see the inflated number of infra startups. | | |
| ▲ | jnovek 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Right? I’ve been through due diligence and it’s neither a quick nor simple process, even for seed. | |
| ▲ | Noaidi 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A great way to launder money then? | | |
| ▲ | jazzyjackson 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Which step of “VC firm with millions to invest” and “fresh grads blow millions on AWS bills, sushi delivery and ketamine” is dirty money being washed? |
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| ▲ | ajross 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "Failure" is the expected median though. You can't due-diligence your way out of "startup ran out of runway"! The discussion here isn't about funding, it's that there's a presumptively useful community tool which got abandoned because its owners took their toys and went home when the money ran out (instead of making a sincere effort at transitioning to community governance). That's on the IP owners being selfish jerks and/or grifting losers. It's not the VC's fault. | | |
| ▲ | singpolyma3 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not on anyone to set up your favourite "governance" system. If anyone honestly wants to keep maintaining or using it the code is still there. | | |
| ▲ | ajross 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Part of the social contract of putting a free software project up for public use and convincing Microsoft to host it for free (!) is indeed that you're going to maintain it in good faith for the people who consume it, and that if you can't you'll make a good faith effort to help the people who do. There are good and bad ways to extract yourself from maintainership obligations. This is the bad way. | | |
| ▲ | skeledrew 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No, there is no social contract here. Microsoft gives free hosting because it's cheap and also provides a path to their paid offerings. People share stuff they work on for fun, to help flesh out their resume, to get help, etc. There's no reason for a maintainer not to drop a project in a heartbeat if it becomes the slightest bit of a burden. | |
| ▲ | marssaxman 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There are no maintainership obligations unless someone pays you for them. | |
| ▲ | Verdex an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No it's not. Also read the link. This is apache 2 licensed. Even in whatever imaginary world where there is such a social contract, there is thankfully a legal contract that includes disclaimer of warranty. | |
| ▲ | jazzyjackson 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sorry but this is an outrageous perspective, at no point does git init / git push am I committing myself to a social contract, in fact there’s probably a license that states no warranty and no support is to be expected… maintainership obligations gtfo if you’re not here paying for support |
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| ▲ | jnovek 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | While most startups fail eventually, failure in less than a year with over 7 million dollars is not the expected median. It’s the exact sort of thing that due diligence is supposed to prevent. Also the whole project is open source. If you want, you could take it over. | | |
| ▲ | realsarm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That's why either VCs confused moat with bot farms and farmed stars over solving genuine problems or they just blindly invested based on founders track record no matter what. To me both are really by product vibe coding hype and chatgpt killing wrappers. | |
| ▲ | gwerbin 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are there cases when VC investors actually went after founders for fraud or embezzlement or misrepresenting the business or something like that? |
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| ▲ | skeledrew 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | At least the repo is still available. Anyone can fork and carry on, create a community, etc. | |
| ▲ | thih9 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Which toys exactly were taken? The repo seems open source, is any component missing? | | |
| ▲ | kaonwarb 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In response to sibling:
> It's still open source because you can fork it if you really want Yes, that's exactly what it means! | |
| ▲ | ajross 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The project name, its community center and hosting environment, the active participation and consent of the copyright holders of the software was withdrawn. This is a dead project, we can all see it. If you want to use it and contribute and get help, you have no where to go. "It's still open source because you can fork it if you really want" is a specious and unhelpful attitude, and it tells me that you, like the owners of this thing, are not to be trusted to manage such a thing. | | |
| ▲ | skeledrew 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The project is Apache2 licensed. You can literally do anything you want with the code. Stop trying to push guilt on people for no longer providing free services. | |
| ▲ | em-bee 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | the only reason to ever fork a project in earnest is because the original project owners are not willing or able to cooperate or accept patches. in other words you fork because you have nowhere else to go. exactly the situation we have here. | |
| ▲ | thih9 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I suppose you can ask them for a refund. |
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| ▲ | root-parent 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The due diligence report just come back: The report says, the CEO and founder, is a Ketamine addicted weirdo, who does Nazi salutes in public, is know to have at least 24 kids, and lives in an isolated farm in Texas, with at least 5 to 7 female partners, and got sued for calling a guy who saved kids a Pedophile. You in? | | |
| ▲ | CuriouslyC 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Only if the CEO is the first man to step foot on mars. He gets to be immortalized, we get to watch him die living his best life. | | | |
| ▲ | DiggyJohnson 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Please follow the HN guidelines. | | |
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| ▲ | sailingparrot 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do you understand that when you raise money it doesn't go into your personal account?
Its not like you can move this money in your retirement account and sail into the sunset. |
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