The new company of the "Father of Android" collapsed: it received investment from Tencent and only released one mobile phone in five years

This article is reprinted with permission from AI new media Quantum Bit (public account ID: QbitAI). Please contact the source for reprinting.

Andy Rubin, the "Father of Android" who caused a storm of protests at Google, is now in trouble again.

After leaving Google due to a sex scandal, he founded the consumer electronics company Essential, which received more than $330 million in financing and became a highly-anticipated hardware unicorn company in Silicon Valley. In October last year, he also designed a remote control-like mobile phone called GEM:

It looks a bit like a PPT phone, but now this uniquely shaped phone has no chance of being released because Essential has announced its bankruptcy.

From birth to death, this company has only sold one mobile phone.

It once raised 330 million yuan to become a unicorn

Essential was founded five years ago in 2015, just after Andy Rubin left Google.

Of course, no one knew about the sex scandal behind the resignation at that time.

Soon, in February 2016, Essential announced that it had completed a $30 million financing round led by Redpoint Ventures and Rubin’s own investment company Playground Global.

With this funding, Essential launched its first mobile phone, the Essential Phone, in 2017.

The appearance design of this phone has some shadows of early iPhones. It has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, a 5.6-inch screen, a 13MP main camera, an 8MP front camera, 4G RAM and 128G storage space. The default operating system is Android 9 Pie. It is priced at US$699.

After the product was launched, Essentila quickly received a larger sum of money, $300 million.

The lead investor is the multinational industrial group Access Industries, which is also the parent company of the well-known record company Warner Music. In addition, Tencent, Amazon and Foxconn also participated in this round of financing.

This $300 million financing also successfully made Essential a unicorn.

Later, they also designed a concept phone called GEM, which has a slender screen like a remote control and a specially designed card-type UI:

There are 4 colors:

Unsellable mobile phone

Essential, which has become a unicorn, looks very promising, but in fact it is shaky.

The company's first product, the Essential Phone, did not sell well and was forced to cut its price by $200. Later, it became the company's only complete product that was actually released for sale.

Because the subsequent products have not been truly developed and manufactured.

In October 2018, Essential carried out large-scale layoffs, reducing the number of employees from 120 to less than 50, and also abandoned the voice assistant Essential Home that it was preparing to develop.

Two months later, their only selling product, the Essential Phone, was discontinued.

However, Essential, which is on the verge of bankruptcy, also left a surprise.

In addition to the only phone, Essential actually has another product on sale, called the Audio Adapter HD, which is the small metallic cube attached to the phone:

In fact, it is an advanced version of the headphone jack converter, and it is said that the sound quality will be better than the ordinary USB-C to 3.5mm headphone jack converter.

When they launched their mobile phone products in 2017, they said they would make such an accessory, but it was delayed for more than a year and was not launched until November 2018. The price was not cheap, at $149.

From being delayed in its delivery just after becoming a unicorn to being on the verge of bankruptcy, the phone went on sale exactly one month after the layoffs. One month after it went on sale, the phone and its accessories were discontinued.

It was such an embarrassing scene, it felt like cutting the last crop of leeks.

Having said that, it is not impossible for this company to survive in 2018.

The New York Times quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that in 2018, Amazon, Walmart and several telecom operators were interested in acquiring Essential.

Of course, if it were to be sold, the price would not be calculated based on the valuation of a $1 billion unicorn.

Affected by the Google incident

In fact, it doesn’t matter if the mobile phone doesn’t sell well. The key is that the founder Andy Rubin has planted a big bomb for Essential.

Just half a year after receiving the 300 million yuan from Access Industries, Amazon, Tencent, Foxconn and other companies, Andy Rubin's big news was made public:

He left Google because he sexually assaulted his female subordinates!

Because of this big news, Andy Rubin took a month off in December 2017 on the grounds of "resolving personal issues."

But a year later, a bigger bomb was revealed:

In order to prevent the incident from getting out of hand, Google tried to cover it up and paid Andy Rubin 90 million U.S. dollars to leave!

Of course, Rubin himself did not admit it, but this did not stop the anger of Google employees: when a senior executive bullied a female subordinate, the company did not punish her squarely, but instead gave her money to get rid of her. This doesn't make sense.

So, at the end of 2018, the ME TOO movement swept Google, and Google employees began a global march, with more than 2,000 employees from various campuses around the world participating.

This also inadvertently cultivated a habit among Google employees to march and protest against their own company.

Now, data from the New York Times says that the company only has about $30 million left in its account, which means that nine-tenths of the previous $300 million has been burned.

So, on February 3, the company pushed the last update for its only fully sold product, Essential Home.

On February 12, they officially posted their last words on their official blog.

"Despite our best efforts to bring the GEM phone to market as quickly as possible, we are unfortunately unable to get it into the hands of our customers. As a result, we have made the difficult decision to cease operations and shut down Essential."

A generation of Silicon Valley hardware unicorns has come to an end.