// startup autopsy

Ducksboard

A dashboard startup that became a talent acquisition

acquisition gone wrongAcqui-hire

Fatal mistake: Ducksboard's niche dashboard market was too narrow to justify independent scale, making it an easy acqui-hire target rather than a standalone business.

Founded	2011
Closed	2014
Country	Spain
Sector	Saas

50%

Key Events Timeline

2011-01-01

FOUNDING

Ducksboard founded in Spain to build real-time dashboard tools for businesses.

2012-06-01

PRODUCT LAUNCH

Ducksboard launches its real-time dashboard platform, gaining early traction among data-driven teams.

2014-01-01

FUNDING

Last funding round recorded, totaling approximately $748K raised over the company's life.

2014-06-01

ACQUISITION ATTEMPT

New Relic acquires Ducksboard in an acqui-hire deal to absorb the engineering team.

2014-09-01

SHUTDOWN

Ducksboard's product is officially shut down post-acquisition, leaving customers without the service.

Full Analysis

Analyst plan

Documented cause

Ducksboard, a real-time dashboard SaaS platform founded in Spain, was acquired by New Relic in 2014. While the acquisition itself occurred, it resulted in a failure outcome for the original product and its user...

s. New Relic executed an acqui-hire strategy, absorbing Ducksboard's talented engineering team into its own organization but discontinuing the Ducksboard product entirely. This left existing customers

Verified lesson

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€1.3M

Peak valuation

HypeCycle · MoatType · ResearchTags

Ducksboard raised €0.747936M before ducksboard's niche dashboard market was too narrow to justify independent scale, making it an easy acqui-hire target rather than a standalone business. ended it. See the documented cause, verified lesson and all failure signals.

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Key Events Timeline

Documented cause

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