TL;DR
- OSOM, the company founded by former employees of Andy Rubin’s Essential, is effectively shutting down later this week.
- The company’s chief executive, Jason Keats, announced the news internally yesterday.
- Most employees are being let go on Friday, but some will remain to push a final update to the Solana Saga.
It’s been a rough week for OSOM Products. The company has been embroiled in legal controversy stemming from a lawsuit filed by a former executive. Now, Android Authority has learned that the company is effectively shutting down later this week.
OSOM Products was formed in 2020 following the disbanding of Essential, a smartphone startup led by Andy Rubin, the founder of Android. Essential collapsed following the poor sales of its first smartphone, the Essential Phone, as well as a loss of confidence in Rubin due to allegations of sexual misconduct at his previous stint at Google. Although Essential as a company was on its way out after Rubin’s departure, many of its most talented hardware designers and software engineers remained at the company, looking for another opportunity to build something new.
In 2020, the former head of R&D at Essential, Jason Keats, along with several other former executives and employees came together to form OSOM, which stands for “Out of Sight, Out of Mind.” The name reflected their desire to create privacy-focused products such as the OSOM Privacy Cable, a USB-C cable with a switch to disable data signaling, and the OSOM OV1, an Android smartphone with lots of privacy and security-focused features.
To fund its mass production, marketing, and future development, OSOM partnered with one of the largest cryptocurrency platforms out there — Solana — to release the OV1 as the Saga, complete with several blockchain-related features. Sometime in March of this year, however, Solana allegedly decided not to choose OSOM once again for the development of the Saga Two, putting the company’s future in jeopardy.
This marked the beginning of a dramatic downward spiral, which OSOM tried to reverse by pivoting towards making an “AI-powered camera” as its next product and selling itself to HP. However, neither option panned out and the company failed to raise more money. After exhausting many options, it appears the company’s funds have largely dried up. As a result, Keats and other executives at OSOM made the decision to effectively shut down the company.
According to multiple sources, OSOM executives held an internal meeting yesterday announcing the decision to shutter the company. Most employees will be laid off this Friday, though a few engineers will remain as contractors so the company can meet its obligation with Solana to push out another security update for the Saga in December. The employees who are being laid off were told they would receive severance and would be eligible for COBRA, both standard practices after a company undergoes mass downsizing.
Android Authority has also learned that Keats addressed the many allegations of financial misconduct levied against himself in a recent lawsuit filed by Mary Stone Ross, OSOM’s former Chief Privacy Officer. The lawsuit alleges that much of OSOM’s financial woes can be blamed on Keats’ spending habits, which he vehemently denies. In a statement, a spokesperson for OSOM said that the company was “aware of the outlandish allegations by a former employee” and was “look[ing] forward to disproving them in court.”
With OSOM closing down, any hopes that the company would produce the Saga Two for Solana are dead. However, it’s possible that Solana Mobile will find (or has already found) a different partner to create the device. Solana Mobile has not commented publicly on the matter, though, so we do not know what their plans are going forward.
