Attabotics CEO on devastating week that brought bankruptcy

retailtechinnovationhub.com

16 points·bcantrill··7 comments

I don't consider this article to contain any information from the CEO's interview other than "yeah, we're bankrupt". It also confusingly transitions into an ad and signup appeal for an innovations award ceremony.

Grating article vs headline for that reason indeed.

The EDC agreed to help find funding, then reported back that they tried and failed, and then put the company into bankruptcy and took over the company for pennies on the dollar. I wonder how sincere their help was.

That's actually an interesting story that I totally failed to get by reading the article! I feel bad about criticizing the article now when it was just too neutrally phrased for me to get the gist.

"The EDC agreed to approach the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, an early backer of Attabotics, about investing again."

Pension plan investing in a startup? Is this common? I would have expected them to be much more risk-averse.

https://www.otpp.com/en-ca/investments/our-investments/teach...

The OTPP has a team for investing in late stage startups (Series B onward), “Teachers’ Venture Growth.” Seems rational if you believe you can gain asset class exposure at a lower cost than outsourcing it to the usual VCs ($10B invested).

The OTPP has $200+ billion in assets; they’re basically a bog-standard institutional investor trying to maximize risk-adjusted returns over a long-term diversified portfolio. (And being too risk averse wouldn’t generate the returns they need to fund their pension obligations without raising contribution rates.)

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