Adapti.me abdicates

This is a hard blow for the Luxembourg startup ecosystem: Adapti.me has just been declared bankrupt.

A "purely" Luxembourgish path

This company, created in July 2016, offered a service of personalization of websites for consumers. Very quickly, it became known as it was selected for the second season of the Fit4Start programme at the end of 2016, which in addition to 16 coaching and support sessions, provides for an endowment of up to €100,000 if the company raises €50,000 in parallel from private funds.

Then in 2018, the startup continued to grow. It participates in the E-marketing fair at the beginning of 2018 and raises €440,000 in September of the same year. It also joins the incubator of BGL BNP Paribas, the LuxFuture Lab. The startup is so much in the news that she flied away with the Luxembourg delegation to the CES in Las Vegas in 2019, participated in the Startup Stories final organized by Paperjam, being ranked in the top 10 best startups of the year, and also be a finalist in the Startup World Cup organized by EY in early 2020.

With 7 employees, it claims 105 million users, 11.5 million products sold through their algorithm and 5,000 queries per... second. Figures make you dream. And then in mid-February, the unimaginable announcement is made: the company is bankrupt.

An end to be integrated, not to be blamed

This news makes a whole ecosystem tremble, because it is a "pure" Luxembourg product that has come to abdicate here. Through the government's Fit4Start programme, incubated in one of the oldest incubators in the place, carried by a "local"... It is also an established company, which had managed to raise a considerable amount of money, in a country where fund-raising is generally limited. It is likely that this will make many people tremble, and perhaps many will try to understand the reasons for "this failure".

Rather, Legal Finder sees this as a lesson above all else, not a failure. Succeeding in building a company that for three and a half years has been able to grow and reach as many clients as Antoine Granjon did is a real challenge that few succeed. Above all, we salute the courage to publicly acknowledge the end of this project: others as promising have chosen to die in the shadows, in silence, rather than reveal the sad truth. We hope that, beyond the initial shock following this announcement, people see the potential of their ideas and are not afraid that they will one day be brought to an end. It is indeed a possibility also encountered by the best startups. It is by accepting this risk and keeping it in mind that we go even further.