STA, 18 September 2021 - Mag-Lev Audio, a Slovenian start-up that developed the first levitating turntable in the world and collected EUR 800,000 in Kickstarter and Indie Gogo campaigns, has gone into receivership. After launching production, the company failed to find a market for its product.
The Nova Gorica District Court launched receivership proceedings on 10 September, according to the AJPES agency for legal records.
The company led by Davorin Furlan and Tomaž Pegan was one of the most successful Slovenian companies on crowdfunding platforms.
The MAG-LEV Audio team manufactured the first levitating turntable in 2016 to raise over EUR 800,000 on Kickstarter and Indie Gogo.
It launched production in a rented facility in Nova Gorica in 2018 and hired staff.
The company planned to make about 1,500 levitating turntables a month at first to sell them mostly in the US, Europe, Australia and Japan. The founders counted on their investment to return in a few months.
But things did not go as planned, as the company never found the right market. It reported on this to its buyers and supporters on crowdfunding platforms, the newspaper Finance said a few days ago.
According to Finance, the company said at the end of last June that in November and December 2019 it managed to sell at least one product a day, but sales slowed down in 2020 and the company could no longer cover its costs.
The problem was allegedly the price of the product, which should be between EUR 600 and EUR 900 for sales to pick up, which the company said would however not cover the costs due to the quality of the product and expensive technology used. The turntables were sold at EUR 1,000-3,000.
Furlan told Finance the value of the investment had been underestimated and put a part of the blame also on the epidemic. "We hope the story is not over yet and that it will continue some day despite receivership," he said.
