Cloud development platform Nitrous.io shuts down

Nitrous.io, an online development environment and IDE, today announced that it is shutting down its service on November 14.

The service is now closed for new signups and the team says it will refund any payments made after October 16. Nitrous’ existing users will be able to download their existing data soon.

The team says that it will also soon release an open-source version of its cloud IDE that its users will be able to run on their own servers. It’s unclear when exactly this will happen, though.

Today’s announcement does come as a surprise and clearly caught the company’s customers unaware. Things had been quiet around Nitrous for a while, though. The company launched its new pricing model back in April, but as far as I can see, the team didn’t release any major new features since then.

Nitrous hired a new CEO last year as it started to push more aggressively to get professional developers — and not just hobbyists and students — onto its platform. Maybe that push didn’t work out as planned and the company simply ran out of money.

Nitrous.io launched back in 2012 and raised a total of $7.65 million, including a $6.65 million Series A round in 2014. Its investors include Bessemer Venture Partners (which led its Series A round), as well as Draper Associates, CrunchFund, 500 Startups, TIBCO Software, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Golden Gate Ventures and Peanut Labs co-founder/CTO Prosper Nwankpa.

We have reached out to the company and some of its investors and will update this post once we learn more (there is always a chance that it was quietly acquired by somebody, too, after all).