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Their website landing page is now also showing the software is no longer maintained.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.
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.
$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
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!
> 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...
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was wondering the same thing. I had never heard of Portal before seeing this post. Actually had to pause the video to search what a Meta Portal even is...
Too bad because it looks like a neat device. This feels the same as discovering a neat SaaS product through a "XYZ is shutting down" post on HN.
For on-the-go compute I am using a 2017 12-inch Macbook (AS1534). This is a lesser known model, it was simply called "12 inch MacBook" (not air or pro) [0].
It has the aluminium body, it is ridiculously thin (3,5mm thinnest point, 13mm thickest point, feet included), it weighs just 920 gram. It charges via USB-C. It has a very good 2304 × 1440 (16∶10) IPS "retina" screen.
I run mine with MacOS/Linux dual boot, I charge it using my phone charger. It keep it in my go-bag at all times. I never have to worry being without it.
What to love:
- Super small, yet very sturdy.
- Can be found for relatively cheap (I paid €300 for mine 2 years ago)
- Really nice screen.
- Keyboard size is really good, though travel is obviously minimal with such a thin laptop.
- Plenty of battery life (and new batteries still available at Mac store last time I asked)
- upgraded model has 1.4Ghz dual core i5, 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD, which is still more than enough for on-the-go use.
What not to love:
- Has only 1 I/O port (USB-C), which is also used for charging.
- No longer receives MacOS updates, if you find a 2017 production model you get updates up to MacOS 13.
- Linux support is not great. The WiFi/Bluetooth chip (BCM15700A2) is not fully supported in Linux, WiFi works but Bluetooth doesn't. Audio via headphone jack works, but speakers don't. There are some experimental patches to get BT and speakers somewhat working, but it's not great.
If you can find it, get a late production model (2017) with the 1.4Ghz CPU upgrade, it will have 16gb RAM instead of 8gb (earlier models) and receive MacOS updates up to MacOS 13.
I had this laptop and I loved it, but it was underpowered even for basic web development by 2023. It struggled to play YouTube videos in the background while I worked.
I really wish they brought back this format with the modern M processors. On the other hand, my M2 Macbook Air is around 300 grams heavier, but I don't need to carry a power adapter most of the time, and the device is much better in every conceivable way.
Glitching attacks are typically performed by switching the supply voltage at quite high frequencies, a typical low-voltage detection won't trigger a reset under such conditions. And this is also why glitching attacks are often performed by spiking higher voltages, not lower. See for example Joe Grant's latest video on breaking crypto wallets [0].
Low-voltage detection is usually implemented as simple comparator which should trigger instantly, but often only on a single Vcc pin, and due to the decoupling caps found on a typical circuit design there is effectively an RC circuit that filters short fluctuations of supply voltage. So most low-voltage detection implementations only trigger on 'longer' periods of low voltage.
Traditionally low-voltage detection features (like brown-out detection) are there to guarantee functionality of the uC itself or the device the uC controls. It is typically not intended as a defence measure against these types of attacks. In fact, 15 years ago it may not have been much of a concern.
Similar story, I had a customer who wanted me to change the entire UI of a legacy application, because some information would not fit on the ancient 1024*786 15" desktop monitor of one employee, meaning he would have to use horizontal scroll constantly.
I recommended them giving this employee a larger monitor, not only would that be much cheaper than having me rebuild the entire UI, it would also boost this employee's productivity. Not to mention that swapping a monitor takes 10 minutes, changing a UI probably weeks.
Customer insisted to change the UI, because "if we give him a new monitor, everyone in the office will want one". I nearly got fired for responding with "Great! Then everyone can benefit from more productivity!".
In the end we did change the UI, I believe the total cost was something like 30k. The customer had maybe 15 employees, so new monitors would still have been much cheaper.
A few months later their offices were remodelled with expensive designer furniture, wooden floors and custom artwork on the walls. Must have cost a fortune. In the end, the employees still worked on ancient computers with 15" monitors, because new computers didn't fit the budget.
It is my understanding that the A18 CPU is pretty well understood already. AFAIK it doesn't have the new architecture that is keeping the Asahi team from supporting the M4 and M5 for example.
But I guess we'll have to wait for devs to get their hands on a Neo device
I'm not sure what Hector's personal choices have to do with not "trusting" a piece of software? It's open source, so if you don't trust the quality of the software, then just inspect it yourself?
Also, FWIW: Hector/Lina is no longer associated with Asahi anymore.
I'd take that claim by Mecha with a huge grain of salt.
How are they going to fund 7 years of support for a device that sells maybe a few thousand units? How are they going to guarantee they will still be around, and interested in maintaining the device drivers in 2033?
The Linux kernel project will remove the device drivers from the mainline kernel if they are no longer actively maintained and in use. So it is very likely that the support will be dropped from the mainline kernel way before 2033, as there probably won't be any users of this device remaining, and the original developers long gone.
Call me negative, but I expect that this company wil just vanish after some time. The team will just move on, maybe even start again under a different name, but there will be nobody to be held responsible for promises and claims they made in the past.
I can completely understand the skepticism, any startup today releasing something and promising to support will be taken with a grain of salt. I cannot guarantee that Mecha will not run out of business in 7 years. But at the very least we have the confidence to commit to 7 years of support, if we are able to keep the show going.
Why we are confident of extending this support -
1. The SOC from NXP is widely used in automotives and industries. Their support is listed till 2036, https://www.nxp.com/products/nxp-product-information/nxp-pro... which means their downstream will keep seeing updates. In above comment I mentioned that they follow 6 months+LTS release dates. To give an example, IMX6 that were released in 2011 are still actively supported in 2026. You can even buy SOMs and are still deployed in production.
2. The WiFi chip we are using is NXP IW612, again has longevity till 2038, which means it will still see its driver being updated and maintained.
3. Our audio codec is from Analog (MAX98090) again widely used and in production.
4. Most of our usb and power controllers are from TI, which can be expected to be around in the kernel for a long time.
5. None of the parts we've used are not recommended for new design or obsolete or come from unknown vendors. A lot of care has been taken in choosing the right parts?
From my point of view our work in supporting is to ensure we pull changes, run our test suites, see if everything works and repeat. What am I missing? There are no device drivers built that are exclusive to the Comet at this stage. You can review our device trees on our repos.
Also, we have a longer roadmap ahead of us - selling few thousand units in 5 days is no indicator of how things will be in the future. We are betting on this hardware and more hardware that we release later.
You can sit on the fence and keep expecting us to fail, that is your prerogative. But that doesn't automatically imply that we are ill-prepared.
2033 is not that far away. If they sell a few thousand items there would still be users, so the kernel would usually not remove the drivers if not defunct.
You might very well be right about the company, it is the likely outcome after all for all companies. But if the kernel support is seeded properly there should be a bit more time than predicted even then.
Also, positively: They did the communication on the website really well (I stumbled over the comet before), extended it nicely and the kickstarter campaign seems to be a big success. They have a good chance to stick around.
As someone who works on a device that was initially released in 2020 and uses a SoC from the same family (i.MX 8M Quad), 7 years of support is not unbelievably long (provided that the company stays afloat at all).
I do the same. I can SSH into my router at home (which is on 24/7), then issue a WOL request to my dev machine to turn it on.
You don't even have to fully shut down you dev machine, you can allow it to go into stand-by. For that it needs to be wired by cable to LAN, and configured to leave the NIC powered on on stand-by. You can then wake up the device remotely via a WOL magic packet. Maybe this is possible with WLAN too, but I have never tried.
Also, you don't need a Tailscale or other VPN account. You can just use SSH + tunneling, or enable a VPN on your router (and usually enjoy hardware acceleration too!). I happen to have a static IP at home, but you can use a dynamic DNS client on your router to achieve the same effect.
I used to work as a freelancer back in the days. I worked a lot for a customer became a good friend. At first I'd work on his projects, but this ultimately shifted to a model where I'd work on projects for his clients, I would bill him, and he would add his margin and bill the end-customer. It worked out great this way.
One day I got a call from him saying that our 'mutual' customer had an urgency job. They were supposed to do a national roll-out of a new payment system, but seemed to have forgotten about a bunch of legacy PoS systems that were still operational and couldn't easily be replaced. Because I was seemingly the only one that was still familiar with this particular system (I worked on it once in the past), the end-customer approached my friend whether I would be available to do this quick. This was in late November, and the rollout was planned for Januari. Because this end-customer is a government org, I realised we'd be guaranteed they wouldn't be working during the holidays (which, in my country is typically 2 weeks for Christmas and new-year's), so really we had only 10 days or so to get it done in time for their team to test it before they holiday shutdown.
I didn't feel like doing such a complex job on such tight deadline. So, I quoted a much higher rate than normal. I also quoted for a multitude of hours that I thought was required, due to the typical overhead that this large end-customer would surely incur. Finally I also added a retainer fee, because I knew that if problems would occur (likely on the last day before the rollout), I'd have to drop anything I was doing and work for them.
I got the job.
I worked feverishly to meet the deadline. I cancelled commitments on other projects, paid an extortionate amount for testing hardware and overnight delivered to my office, bought very expensive testing gear, signed all the NDA's required to work on PoS card payment interfaces, etc. I then worked basically round the clock for 10 days straight to get it done. I did get it done in time, submitted the code to the repository and fired an email to the team-manager that it was in fact done a day early. ...I was greeted with an auto-reply the manager would be on holiday till mid-January, which was the week that entire new payment system had to be rolled out nation-wide.
I wasn't feeling great about it, but my friend urged me to send the invoice for the work I had done, and also the retainer for the rest of December and January. This would allow the customer to write of the expenses in the current calendar-year. I sent the invoice, it was the most amount of money I'd ever invoiced, and I'd normally invoiced per month, this was for a mere 10 days.
December passed, no response from the supposed review team. I stayed on stand-by, declined any other work, stayed sober during the various new-year's office parties, always brought my laptop along, etc.
January came and went. Still no response from the code review team. The new payment system was due to be rolled out mid-january, but nothing had happened. The company had done extensive ad-campaigns beforehand announcing the new payment convenience for their end-users, so the only 'feedback' I saw were frustrated users on Twitter. I still felt bad about charging for the retainer.
This kept going. At some point I did stop sending invoices for the retainer. My friend always paid me in advance (the end-customer was notoriously slow to pay, though did always pay in the end), and I didn't want to cause him too much exposure.
To my knowledge, the software I wrote was never used in the end. To the public it was stated that the PoS systems were simply too old to be upgraded (not true, obv) and that they'd replace them 'soon'. It is now 4 or 5 years laters, the old PoS terminals are still there, sans the functionality I added.
By pure coincidence, years after the job I found out that an old friend of mine, who was also a freelancer at the time, was tasked around that same time by the same customer to do a code-review of a supposed PoS system upgrade. Without realising, he reviewed my code! He was under the same time pressure, and did the code review during Christmas to deliver the results on time before the national rollout in mid-January. He also charged a huge amount of money for it, was also paid, and also never heard about it again. At least he said he remembered being impressed by the quality of the code, and didn't find any defects. So that's about the best outcome of the project I guess.
My takeaway from this: If you are a freelancer, and a large customer wants something done in a hurry, charge more than you ever dared, don't feel bad about it. You'll find that suddenly there isn't as much of a deadline anymore. If the customer declines due to the price, you should be happy for dodging a bullet.
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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