so… why?

well, the company isn't going down for any of the classic reasons.

no, it isn't investor pressure.

no, it isn't a team fallout.

no, it isn't someone pulling a coup.

none of that stuff.

honestly, if it were any of those reasons this would be a short letter.

the real reason is harder to explain - and it's deeply personal.

unifund ai was our first company. not a side project, not a student club experiment any more - but a real company with real investors, real contracts, and real consequences for every decision we made.

and we made mistakes. a lot of them.

we hired fast - too fast - and for the wrong roles. when you're excited and freshly funded, it feels right to grow. but we brought on people before we had the systems in place to support them, before we even knew clearly what the company needed to become.

we overcomplicated our hardware engineering. we tried to build everything in-house - custom drone frames, electronics, onboard compute. ambitious, sure. but it meant slow iteration cycles, massive component costs, and a team constantly firefighting manufacturing issues instead of pushing the real frontier: the software.

we went through iteration after iteration of our products - each one exciting, each one teaching us something, but each one also burning time and money we hadn't budgeted for.

all of this caused serious financial damage.

when you combine the weight of those decisions with operational costs that kept climbing - lab space, equipment, salaries, logistics - you end up in a place where the runway disappears faster than any spreadsheet had predicted.

we could have kept going. we could have found another bridge round, stretched things another 6 months, maybe 12. but without a product that was cleanly generating revenue, we'd just be delaying the inevitable while burning through goodwill and people's time.

that felt irresponsible. and unfair - to the team, to our investors, and to ourselves.

so what's up?

over the past four years, we both, and our friends have poured everything into this thing.

it started as a university dream - two people who genuinely believed they could build autonomous systems that see, think, and act. we talked about it in lecture halls, sketched it on napkins, stayed up working on it while everyone else was at parties.

and we did build it. really. drones that navigated without gps. 3.4K+ systems deployed to ukraine. computer vision that worked. a team of 22 brilliant people. €4.4m raised. it was real, and we're proud of it.

but unifund ai was always going to be more than hardware. what we truly fell in love with - what we'd sketch out at 2am just because it excited us - was always the software. the intelligence layer. the thing that makes robots actually understand the world.

unifund the hardware company slowly stopped feeling like the thing we were meant to build.

unifund ai was always driven by the obsession to build something genuinely new.

and we found that obsession again - clearer than ever - in robotics.

that's 100% on us to have taken this long to see it clearly.

we could certainly have kept dogging it out for another year in the hardware-first direction. but we don't have any new moves there that we truly believe in.

moving ahead in that state just feels wrong.

instead of forcing something that doesn't feel right - sometimes you have to have the strength to let go. because what lies ahead might be more beautiful than what lies behind.

that's an incredibly hard decision to make when you have a team who gave everything, supporters who believed deeply, and real technology that works.

it feels right.

for the team - each person has known this news for a while now, and each is figuring out their next thing.

this is genuinely the most talented group of people we've ever had the privilege of working alongside. you could see it in everything they shipped.

to the team - the hardest part of this decision was knowing that shutting down means we don't get to come in every day and work together.

tomas, lukas, saulė, goda, benediktas, svajūnė, smiltė, selin, julius, aiden, emilija, mantas, fin, dominyka, dominykas, sofija, arian, aistė, elias, augustas.

you're our heroes. you gave it all your heart.

thank you for inspiring us.

and to the people outside the team who showed up for us in ways we'll never forget - gani, armen, berca, margarita, saulius, robert, darius, benas, augustinas, jovita, beatričė, jolita, sandra, joris, martyna, and danielius. your belief, your open doors, your late-night calls - they mattered more than you know.

thank you. genuinely.

so, what's next?

this is the part that actually makes us smile.

we're starting something new. it's called projectai.

new team. new revenue streams. new people onboard. and a much cleaner, sharper focus - robotics. the full thing. hardware and software together, built as one. the way it actually has to work if you want robots that are genuinely capable in the real world.

we're not abandoning hardware - we're doing it smarter this time. purpose-built, revenue-focused, and with the software intelligence baked in from day one rather than bolted on at the end.

we're supported by kilo health, which means we have the runway and the backing to do this properly from day one.

and we're not doing it alone. we're currently a team of 23, and we've got two incredible new people who've just joined - kasra and arturas. both of them are seriously smart, and they're already helping us shape what robotics can look like when it's done right. we couldn't be more excited to have them onboard.

this is what we love. this is what we want to do. and honestly - it feels like unifund ai, in all its chaos and beauty and mistakes, was always pointing us here.

we've been building since we were students with nothing but a dream and a shared obsession. we're still those same people - just with four years of hard-won lessons in our bones.

its been a ride.

to everyone who ever believed in unifund ai - you were part of something real. the technology worked. the systems flew. the vision was never wrong.

you were always what made this place special. and that doesn't go away.

and look - many people don't understand what it's actually like to have your own company.

we do. and the closest thing we can compare it to is raising a baby.

you pour everything into it. you lose sleep over it. you celebrate every tiny win like it's the biggest thing in the world, and you feel every setback in your chest. it's yours. it's alive because of you. and no matter how hard it gets, you can't just walk away - because you love it.

unifund ai was that for us. completely and fully.

there were incredible highs. there were moments we genuinely didn't know if we'd make it through the week. there were lessons we couldn't have learned any other way - lessons about people, about money, about building, about ourselves.

we made mistakes. real ones. costly ones. and we'd do it again - because those mistakes are exactly why the next thing will be way cooler.

every scar from unifund ai is a blueprint for what projectai becomes.

robots are meant to be built. and we will build them.

but here's the thing we want to say out loud - and we're brave enough to admit it.

yes, we made mistakes on unifund ai. in development, in hiring, in financials. real mistakes, with real consequences.

but we were always honest. about the company, about what we were able to ship, about where we were. that honesty is something we'll never apologise for.

and here's what we're genuinely proud of - we never once slapped a "coming soon" label on an unfinished product and called it a launch.

you bought our products. you could actually use them. right then, right there. that's what made us different.

we see it everywhere - people shipping landing pages dressed up as products, "coming soon" labels on things that won't exist for two years, promises of what something will be after a dozen updates. saas projects, hardware projects, you name it. it's become almost normal.

our engineering minds just don't work that way. we couldn't do it even if we tried.

we shipped things you could hold, fly, test, break, and give us feedback on. not a promise. not a waitlist. not a roadmap dressed up as a product. the real thing, as it was, right now.

that's rare. and we knew it was rare. and we're glad we held that standard even when it was hard.

so with projectai - same deal. we will ship an actually good product. one you're going to love. not a teaser, not a vision deck, not a "coming soon" with a countdown timer.

the real thing. when it's ready. and it's going to be worth the wait 😄

unifund ai may be no more.

but we're just getting started.

don't lose that spark.

thank you for a wonderful journey.

we love u.

see you on the other side 💜

- rokas & vakarė