11 Feb. (Portaltic/EP) –
In 2017 a project appeared that sought make housework easier with an automated machine that promised fold and perfume clothes in a few secondswhich would be ready to hit the market at the end of 2019 but since the beginning of the pandemic little else has been heard from him.
FoldiMate was presented during the CES fair in Las Vegas in 2017, with a first prototype that its managers improved for the same fair a year later.
With performance limited to just four seconds per garment, the idea was to use the FoldiMate with both clothing such as shirts and pantswith sizes greater than six-year-old children and less than adult XXL, as with pillowcases and towels small, medium and large size.
Its development was based on raising money through reserves, by way of collective financing, and the search for investors. The goal was start marketing it at the end of 2019, but various delays, including testing of a new algorithm, postponed its release indefinitely.
However, to this day nothing is known about the continuity of this project. The web is not accessible, although they do maintain the Facebook pagewhose latest publications date from 2019. The two contact emails that are provided here bounce a shipping error message claiming that “the address has not been found”, as we have been able to verify in Europa Press.
With the help of Archive.org you can access the latest blog post of Foldimate, dated December 23, 2019. In it, those responsible explained that they were not going to attend CES 2020 to go deeper into the tests of the algorithm that they had just updated.
The blog, however, does not contain more news. Although it is in the comments where you can discover something more about this project. Specifically, on February 27, 2021, they alluded to the problems that had appeared with the pandemic.
These same problems are collected in one of the last answers to the questions of the followers on the Facebook Page, dated January 4, 2021. Here, at least, they report that “given the high uncertainty” surrounding the project, they made the decision not to continue publishing updates. They also indicate that they were then meeting with “a credible investment banker to find the best route forward.”
As can be seen from the comments of the people and the responses of the FoldiMate team, who had trusted the project and made an individual investment as a reserve, they could request the amount back.
