this week Kune founder Robin Reecht posted the news on LinkedIn that Kune has ceased operations. The company has filed for insolvency.
In the LinkedIn post, Reecht said a perfect storm of rising costs and evaporating venture funding left him with no option but to shut the company down.
This is all happening almost exactly one year after raising a $1 million pre-seed round, a raise that sparked controversy over expat funding favoritism (Reecht is French) that dogged him and Kune to the end.
“With the current economic downturn and investment markets tightening up, we were unable to raise our next round,” Reecht said in the post. “Coupled with rising food costs deteriorating our margins, we just couldn’t keep going.”
Reecht has not responded to our efforts to secure an interview. He did say in the LinkedIn post that he may be willing to discuss Kune’s demise at a later date.
“Many things could have been done differently, better certainly,” he wrote. “The coming months will allow us to reflect on Kune’s failure, and I hope to share about it when the time will be right.”
We did manage to speak yesterday with Zach George, managing partner of Launch Africa Ventures, the lead investor in last year’s pre-seed round.
George offered some candid thoughts on what happened with Kune. He believes Kune was frustratingly close to hitting the benchmarks required to raise the capital it needed to fight another day. And he insisted that Kune executed well. And finally, the aforementioned hate Kune received was unwarranted and uninformed, but probably ultimately irrelevant to the outcome.
George said the crux of Kune’s failure was that rising costs crushed the company’s margins, a particular problem when a core value proposition was fresh, authentic meals home delivered for about $3. Inflation became the skunk at Kune’s garden party.
Read the full story at the Africa SMME Tech Report