Yahoo Finance Events app backed by Boris Johnson and Innocent Smoothie founders to shut
An events listings app once praised by Boris Johnson as “wonderful” and backed by the founders of Innocent Smoothies and the founders of Google DeepMind is to 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 “about to pass through the pearly gates of city-discovery-app heaven.”
“We hope to find a good home for Dojo, but as for now we’ve decided to go out with a bang,” Dojo editor in chief Duncan Griffiths wrote in the email.
“Until the end of March, we’re gonna be counting down our top 25 venues in London on the home-feed alongside some of our favourite features and pieces of content from the last few years. After that, you’ll still be able to use Dojo for the categories function until sometime in summer.”
Dojo and Griffiths did not immediately respond to messages sent over Twitter and LinkedIn.
Dojo is a curated event listings app that highlights the best things to do in London and Paris. It was founded in 2014 by three 20-something Bristol University graduates. 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 from investors in 2015 from a group of investors including Playfair Capital, ad agency M&C Saatchi’s venture capital arm, and the London Co-Investment Fund (LCIF), an initiative set up by then Mayor of London Boris Johnson to support tech startups in the capital.
Dojo was LCIF’s first ever investment and Boris Johnson said in a statement at the time: “We’ve lashed out £180,000 to support this wonderful app. Dojo is the way to enjoy London.”
JamJar Investments, the venture capital fund set up by the founders of Innocent Smoothies, was also an investor in the app. Richard Reed, Adam Balon, and Jon Wright, the three cofounders of Innocent and JamJar, each owned a 3.4% stake in the business according to filings from 2016.
Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, the cofounders of artificial intelligence business Google DeepMind, are also listed as shareholders in the 2016 filing, the most recent annual return available.
Accounts filed in December 2018 said the business had made a loss of £2.5m in the preceding nine months. Separate filings suggest the company received additional funding of close to £1m in December.
Dojo competed with ticketing and listings apps such as YPlan and Dice, as well as more traditional listings magazines such as Time Out. YPlan, which was founded in 2012, raised £31m from investors including Aston Kutcher and Lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman. However, it sold to Timeout for just £1.6m in 2016.
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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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