Autodesk in Iceland closing down: Is 2016 the year of “Closing-up-shop”?
Autodesk in Iceland (previously Modio) has laid off all its employees and is closing up shop.
Modio was founded in 2014 by Hilmar Gunnarsson, and sold less than 18 months later to 3D printing giant Autodesk. The company created a smartdevice app to build 3D printable toys that was later rebranded to join the Tinkercad family as Tinkerplay.
The team in Iceland was working on a consumer 3D printer called Thingmaker with toy company Mattel set to launch this fall. The layoffs were announced in late August this year, and includes everyone in Iceland and people working on the same project in San Francisco and Toronto. Keen Reddit users have pointed out that theThingmaker website has been closed down, and pre-orders of the printer have been stopped on Amazon.
The reason I bring this up is that it’s an interesting fate. Three fairly prominent tech companies in Iceland laid off all their employees in the same year. Oz began by laying everyone off in May (in what I coined as Black Friday). Oz still has some operations and might get back on track, but it suggest turbulence anyway. Plain Vanilla announced a wind-down several weeks ago, laying off the 38 that were left at the company, and while Autodesk (Modio) hasn’t sent out a specific press release, the operations in Iceland are closing down.
Will 2015 be known as the year of unprecedented VC investment in Iceland, and 2016 the year of closing-up-shop?
