[notahacker]

Or the payout might be less significant than the amount you paid for your options

Consider that (i) based on what you've told us the original VCs have declined to put any further money in to keep the company alive and have therefore probably written off the entire investment and (ii) any buyer probably needs to hire the founders for a couple of years to actually be able to use the IP, and therefore wants to apportion a sizeable proportion of any money they're willing to pay for the IP to their earnout package rather than compensating shareholders and creditors of the dead company.

And the product apparently doesn't generate non-trivial revenue and was built in 18 months for ~$3m by a team who are all available for hire, so it's not like there's an obvious reason for another party interested in the space to pay massive amounts for the IP - remarkable or otherwise - even if there wasn't pressure to conclude a deal asap...