Six Months After Launch, Website Monitoring Startup Verelo To Shut Down And Return Funding

We’ve received word that Verelo, a Toronto-based startup that provides website monitoring services, is shutting down. The company announced the news today in an email to users signed by co-founder Andrew McGrath.

The company, which provided uptime and performance analytics as well as malware detection and site health monitoring services, stopped billing several weeks ago and plans to return its remaining funding to investors.

It was a short run for Verelo. The company was founded at the beginning of this year by CEO McGrath and CTO Michael Curry and made its official public launch in June as it graduated out of Toronto’s Extreme Startups incubator program.

But it turns out Verelo did not have the traction and funding needed to make it to the next level amid the serious competition that already exists in the space. Curry left the company earlier this fall, and, McGrath wrote, “it’s clear that we’re still playing a big game of catch up and have not got the financial backing required to truly fulfill our one big goal of making the Internet a better place.”

It takes a lot of courage to admit when something isn’t working out as well as had been hoped, and Verelo users have taken to Twitter to give their goodbyes:

We’ve reached out to Verelo for additional details and comment on what’s next for the team, and will report back with anything we hear. Here is the email McGrath has sent to users:

“Hi Everyone,

Its with great sadness that I write this message to inform you that we’ve made the decision to close down Verelo.

We’ve been weighing up our options for a while now, however at the end of the day we’ve been struggling to grow at a sufficient rate to become long term profitable. I personally feel that the most responsible thing we can do as a company is to conserve our remaining funding and return it to our investors.

If you’re not familiar with our story, Verelo was founded by a friend of mine Michael Curry and myself at the beginning of this year. We launched in February and in March we’re accepted into Extreme Startups in Toronto Canada. Our time in Extreme Startups was amazing, the value they brought to Verelo and the contributions they have made to the community in Toronto have been massive; this is evident through the great companies they have helped get off the ground. While Mike made the decision to leave the company a few months ago, I decided to give it my best and push on. We brought on several great people during this time, including the wonderful Vanessa who will be going back to focus on her Jewlery Design business. Unfortunatly while we made some great strides forward, its clear that we’re still playing a big game of catch up and have not got the financial backing required to truly fulfill our one big goal of making the Internet a better place.

We did see this coming, and all billing stopped several weeks ago.

If you would like to export any of your data, you can use the export features in your account on the reporting pages. If you have any additional export requests please feel free to reach out to support@verelo.com for further assistance.

Please feel free to reply to this email directly, I\’ll get it and try reply to as many as possible.

Kind regards,

Andrew McGrath
CEO Verelo Inc.”