The Strange Case Of A $38 Million Enterprise Company That's Gone Missing

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http://www.businessinsider.com/pano-logic-is-out-of-business-2012-11

Just a few months ago, Pano Logic, an enterprise tech startup seemed to be have a bright future replacing oldfashioned PCs with up-to-the-minute cloud technology.

Today, the company has shut down, its leaders have vanished, and its customers have been left hanging.

The company's PR team has confirmed to Business Insider that Pano is out of business. No more details.

Companies go out of business all the time. But what's particularly odd about Pano Logic is how it did so.

It was like sneaking out in the middle of the night, says Network World's Paul McNamara. Employees were told "out of the blue" that the company was shutting down, McNamara reports.

A search on LinkedIn shows that 70 members listed Pano as an employer.

Pano made so-called thin clients, which let enterprises deliver virtual desktops over the network, instead of installing software on a PC. The Redwood City, Calif., company was founded in 2006, and headed by former Wyse CEO John Kish. 

Earlier this year, Dell paid $600 million to buy Kish's former company, which also made thin clients.

Kish talked to Business Insider at that time, and said that business was booming. Microsoft's move to Windows 8 had made a lot of enterprise companies thinking about using virtual desktops. 

In fact, the company had--just a week ago--announced a big, two-year deal with Alabama's largest credit union, Redstone, to replace over 700 PCs with Pano's thin clients.  Pano had other credit unions as customers, too.

Yesterday, Natasha Chilingerian at Credit Union Times discovered that the company was in bankruptcy and had "vanished." Customers had taken to leaving frantic messages on the company's Facebook page. 

The company's website is still up with one notable change: the page naming the company's managers is blank. Ditto for the page listing its investors.

Pano Logic had received $38 million in venture capital, including a $10 million round in 2010 led by Navin Chaddha of Mayfield Fund, with participation by Goldman Sachs and Foundation Capital.

According to McNamara, employees were told the reason for the shutdown was some kind of cease-and-desist order--which apparently the executives took to heart.

We've reached out to one of Pano's founders and other insiders and will update this story if we hear back.

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• Thin client vendor Pano Logic stealthily closes doors (electronista.com)