Founder Sam Jadallah explains his side of the story here.
Ok, so what happened? This past summer, we began fundraising for our next financing round. In early September, we were approached by a public company who understood the product we built, the engineering behind it, and the opportunity it represented. Initially they proposed investing, but quickly shifted the conversation to an acquisition... Our signed agreement restricted our ability to solicit other bids or fundraise and targeted a close on December 11th, 2017... On December 11th, they called me and stated they would not complete the acquisition nor revisit the investment proposal. I was stunned. The reason is still not understood. We had extended our cash to get to the closing date, and now were left without alternatives. Rather than telling our dedicated team that we were accelerating our growth plans and their equity ownership might provide them some financial stability, I had to tell them we could not continue operations.
And
To our beta users, pre-order customers, suppliers and partners, I’m so very saddened that we can’t deliver Otto, which was planned for first revenue in just four weeks... Otto will not ship next month and it may never ship.