An events calendar app once praised as “wonderful” by Boris Johnson and backed by the founders of Innocent Smoothies and the founders of Google DeepMind is set to be shut down.
Dojo announced in an email to users this week that “the Dojo dream is coming to an end.” The company said it was “am about to step through the pearly gates of city discovery app heaven.”
“We hope to find a good home for Dojo, but for now we have decided to end with a bang,” Dojo editor-in-chief Duncan Griffiths wrote in the email.
“By the end of March, we’ll be counting down our top 25 venues in London in the Home feed, alongside some of our most popular features and content from recent years. After that, you can continue to use Dojo for the categories feature until sometime in the summer.”
Dojo and Griffiths did not immediately respond to messages sent via Twitter and LinkedIn.
Dojo is a curated event listing app that highlights the best things to do in London and Paris. It was founded in 2014 by three University of Bristol graduates in their twenties. The trio told TechCrunch at the time that the app would help millennials “Find a good pop-up, speakeasy, exhibition, market or night out in London.”
The app raised £800,000 in 2015 from a group of investors that included Playfair Capital, the venture capital arm of advertising agency M&C Saatchi, and the London Co-Investment Fund (LCIF), an initiative by then-London Mayor Boris Johnson to support technology startups in the capital.
Dojo was LCIF’s first investment and Boris Johnson said in a statement at the time: “We have donated £180,000 to support this wonderful app. Dojo is The way to enjoy London.”
JamJar Investments, the venture capital fund founded by the founders of Innocent Smoothies, was also an investor in the app. Richard Reed, Adam Balon and Jon Wright, the three co-founders of Innocent and JamJar, each owned a 3.4% stake in the company, according to 2016 filings.
Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, co-founders of artificial intelligence company Google DeepMind, are also listed as shareholders in the 2016 filing, the most recent financial statements available.
Accounts filed in December 2018 showed the company had made a loss of £2.5 million over the previous nine months. Separate filings show the company received additional funding of almost £1 million in December.
Dojo competed with ticketing and listings apps such as YPlan and Dice, as well as more traditional listings guides such as Time Out. YPlan was founded in 2012 and raised £31 million from investors including Aston Kutcher and Lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman, but was sold to Timeout in 2016 for just £1.6 million.
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Oscar Williams-Grut covers banking, fintech and finance for Yahoo Finance UK. Follow him on Twitter at @OscarWGrut.
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