Once worth $800m, Tintri is winding up its Cork business after flirting with bankruptcy
The US data storage firm hit a rough financial patch and was acquired by a competitor in late August.
TINTRI, A US tech firm founded by Irish man Kieran Harty, has moved to wind up its local operations after filing for bankruptcy and then being acquired by a competitor.
The company, based in California, specialises in data storage hardware and its accompanying software.
In 2014 it opened a technical support centre in Cork to support the European, Middle East and African market and complement its other offices across the US, Europe and Asia.
The company was founded in 2008 by Harty, who previously worked at VMWare and EMC. Harty was the firm’s chief technology officer after serving as its chief executive until 2013.
The company fell into financial trouble over the last year and formally applied for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US in July, which would allow it to restructure its debts.
Tintri was saved at the 11th hour when it was acquired by another US firm, DataDirect Networks (DDN) in August for $60 million, much lower than the company’s one-time valuation of $800 million.
Tintri’s website has been re-branded as “Tintri by DDN”. According to DDN, Tintri will run as a separate division with its own sales, support and engineering teams. Tintri has 1,600 customers as of the time of the acquisition.
DDN said in a press release earlier this week that Tintri would be supported with 100 new hires, but it was not clear how the deal would affect existing Tintri staff.
Meanwhile, both of Tintri’s Cork-based subsidiaries are due to go into liquidation with the firms’ creditors scheduled to meet next week.
The current status of the local operation and its staff is unknown, but it was reported in July that the company was closing all of its European locations - which also included an office in London.
Harty, Tintri and DDN were contacted for comment, but none had responded at the time of publication.
Kieran Harty
Most recent company filings for Tintri’s operations in Ireland show the Cork-based offshoot had revenue of $24.2 million for the year ended January 2017 with an after-tax profit of $889,177.
It had an average of 68 employees on its books for the 12-month period.
Financial trouble
The past 12 months have been tumultuous for Tintri. The company halted its initial public offering on the Nasdaq in late June 2017 only to recommence the flotation the next day.
The offering reportedly valued the company at $215 million, lower than the $800 million valuation it had garnered in previous years following VC backing to the tune of $262 million.
Big-name US VC firms like Insight Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners were among the backers. In March of this year Tintri named new chief executive Tom Barton who took over the role from Ken Klein.
In July, the company was threatened with delisting by Nasdaq for failing to file its necessary forms.
Following the bankruptcy filing that same month, the company enlisted Robert Duffy of Berkeley Research Group, a consulting firm, as chief restructuring officer.
Duffy also did not respond to Fora‘s request for comment, but he previously told tech news site The Register that Tintri’s sales did not grow enough to balance the cash it was burning through, while its initial public offering did not raise as much money as hoped.
“Tintri’s orders for new products declined, it lost a few key customers and, consequently, its declining revenues led to the company’s difficulties in meeting day-to-day expenses, as well as long-term debt obligations,” he said in a statement to the website.
Tintri operated in a difficult industry competing with other heavyweights providing storage services, including HP Enterprise and IBM.
