Textile worksa startup focused on cloud-native development tools, announced today on LinkedIn that it will close, a sad day for any startup.
“I am very sad to announce – officially – that Weaveworks will be closing its doors and going out of business. Clients and partners will work with a financial manager that we will announce shortly,” wrote CEO Alexis Richardson, who helped launch the company in 2014.
The company tackled the issue of uneven sales, a big problem for startups, but especially for those in Weavework’s position. When it was launched in 2014, cloud native was hardly on anyone’s lips. Kubernetes wouldn’t be released until next year and was early to market.
But over time, they faced increasing competition from companies like Harness Labs and CircleCI, which were much better capitalized. Richardson says that while they saw double-digit growth in 2023, sales were “clean” and they were short of capital and the opportunity to acquire fell through, he said.
With few prospects, the company had no choice but to take the step of termination. Richardson apologized for the company’s predicament in the LinkedIn post. “I can only apologize to everyone for this difficult turn. I could say this shouldn’t have happened, but I know we are not alone in this market. Bigger vessels have gone astray,” he wrote.
Weaveworks has raised a significant amount of money along the way, over $61 million, per Crunchbase, but its latest round was $36 million at the end of 2020. As the economy turned in 2022, as Richardson pointed out, the market became tough for many startups out there. He is only the latest victim.
The company is leaving behind some open source software that it says will continue, but details on how that will happen are not yet available. “The story doesn’t end here — open source software is used everywhere. I work with many large organizations to make sure CNCF Flux is in its healthiest state. More on that soon,” he wrote.
