Yesterday on her personal blog, Mandala Games founder Nadya Jahan announced that the company filed for bankruptcy on February 6th. Her blog post[fr], entitled “Merci,” is a giant thank you to all those who supported her – investors, team members, family, clients, entrepreneurs – a very touching post after 3 years of running the company.
The Nantes-based Mandala Games was most well known for its casino-like social games, and while the company recently announced integration with Betable, a service that lets users use real money when betting on social games, it seems that this was not a big enough injection of revenue to keep the studio afloat. Jahan herself has been very active in the community – I saw her speak at Web2Day last year, and she was a member of the jury at AngelHack Paris this past December.
On a personal note, I’d like to say “Thank you” to Nadya – while we’ve only met a few times, her openness and willingness to share her failure is a great lesson to all French entrepreneurs. Nadya is a very intelligent entrepreneur, and I have no doubt that she’ll continue to do amazing things. While I’m sure it will take some time to process the past 3 years, I look forward to sitting down with her down the road and learning from her experience, and hopefully she will share some real insights with entrepreneurs who are on the cusp of taking off, but just need a little push from an experienced member of the ecosystem.
You can follow Nadya on Twitter at @NadyaJahan, and you can check out an entire list of the games that Mandala Games developed here.
Hat Tip for FrenchWeb for picking up the story – FrenchWeb CEO Richard Menneveux was among those mentioned in Nadya’s long list of thanks.