[toomuchtodo]

Potentially an acquihire due to exhausting runway? Would align with the idea of a startup funding crunch in the current macro, but only someone with transaction details and willing to violate an NDA (if one exists) would be able to share (if details aren’t going to be made public). Depending on comp, benefits, and infra, it is not outside of the realm of possibility to burn through $32M (Sep 2022 Series B raise) in ~15 months (~$2.1M/month).

Sucks for customers but is hopefully a soft landing for Airplane team ending up in an org that hard pivoted to B2B recently (and hence can afford to continue their employment).

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/airplane

[amatecha]

I wonder if there's a business/service that estimates "remaining funding" based on raised funds vs. number of employees and their respective role's average salary? You could almost see it coming when a company is still in the early stages, probably not generating revenue, and burning up cash. The fact I even think about this means someone in the area of business finance thought of it a looong time ago... haha

[toomuchtodo]

Could probably build this with paid access to Crunchbase data set and LinkedIn headcount. Their roles, when advertised, should have (broadly defined) cash comp depending on state pay transparency laws. Cool idea.

Seriously though, if you're a business like https://simpleclosure.com/ you'd probably use this for prospecting. Recruiters too might pay for such a list to recruit from companies in peril ("motivated talent"). Lots of ways to potentially squeeze some fiat from this idea imho.

[jakemoshenko]

You're missing the revenue component if you do that.

[bdcravens]

If they indeed ran out of runway, then Airplane missed an opportunity for a memorable "our incredible journey" post.

[swyx]

usual caveat that fundraise announcements can happen anywhere from 1-18 months after the actual round was raised so dont read too much into the timing

but also linkedin says that had up to 50 employees. highly doubt they were each making like 500k/yr cash on average

[toomuchtodo]

> but also linkedin says that had up to 50 employees. highly doubt they were each making like 500k/yr cash on average

Cloud/servers/infra/where the bits live and move + people + misc biz expenses were assumed in my estimate.

[swyx]

if they were spending that much on cloud/servers/infra they wouldnt have a revenue problem... typically

[jeremyjh]

They offered a nearly free runtime and free network ingress/egress. You’d only have to buy one $10 seat and use it for ETL to cost them a lot of money a month. No idea if anyone did that though.

[swyx]

most reasonable companies have limits to prevent abuse of that stuff, in the fine print. a professional company like airplane would not let that bankrupt them, this is rookie league