Is Crowdcube's Inspiral Visionary Products about to go bust??

Inspiral Visionay Products (IVP) raised £250k on Crowdcube in 2013 - its was lauded by the platform as a major success.

We pointed out a year later that they had failed to get anywhere close to their projections.

Inspiral's sister company Ekopia has gone into liquidation.

Now for the interesting part.

Ekopia have gone down all guns blazing - owing £454k to creditors, most of it to trade creditors. The total it can't pay back is just shy of £500k.

The accounts for IVP  are late and a little thought crept into our mind concerning the possibility of cost and profit centres. Of course we would have to wait for IVP's accounts to be filed but the size of the trade debtors for Ekopia seems high for a small restaurant outlet alone. Certainly much higher than the reported 1 year creditor figure on the accounts for YE March 2015.

We will let you know.

We had this response from the CEO of both Ekopia and IVP

Hey Rob - interesting write up about us on your blog - its good that people are watching carefully but l do need to set a few things straight. Yes our sister company did go into administration - which sadly was the right thing to do to allow us to focus fully on the core business. We owed around £29K to creditors at the time - though a good chunk more was owed to our own wholesale company (though nowhere near £500K). None of the investors in that business lost out as we had given all of them shares of the wholesale business when this was founded 5 years ago. Our accounts are late because we switched over to SAP last year and that has been a tricky new system to come to terms with - so we're making sure we get things right. Yes we are not quite on track with our forecast but we are as dedicated as ever, driven by our mission and determined to create a successful and thriving business. We've learned at lot in the last few years and we have a huge amount of opportunity on our near horizon. Keep up the good work of checking in on people's promises 😀 Dominik (Co-Founder and CEO)

Dom may not be a figures man - the actual, factual, liquidator report verifiable, figure for unpaid debts is £465k - most of which is in unpaid trade creditors. That is quite close to £500k in the world of stats. Ok so £217k (or just under half) of this is owed to Inspiral - so that bit's true. NO IT'S NOT - the IVP accounts have now been filed and the debt was only £165k see post on IVP.

We are not sure what to make of this really? To claim that Inspiral is 'not not quite on track' is laughable - its on a totally different line altogether, heading in the opposite direction.