Writing at LinuxGram.com, Maureen O'Gara reports today that Lineo, faced with a liquidity crisis, has obtained emergency funding to keep its doors open. O'Gara says that during the last several weeks Lineo didn't have the funds to cover final paychecks to recently laid off employees or to its current staff, but that at… a meeting held yesterday with financial backers (the Canopy Group and Egan Managed Capital), Lineo received a commitment of an additional $1 million equity funding in order to help it weather the current storm and achieve its goal of profitability by mid-2002.

LinuxDevices.com's Rick Lehrbaum spoke with Lineo CEO Matt Harris, who confirmed that Lineo has indeed been grappling with a liquidity crisis, and that he had just obtained “a firm commitment of at least $1 million” in equity funding. Harris said he is in an ongoing discussion regarding how much beyond $1M, but that the range of $1M to $5M was under discussion. “They wanted to provide sufficient funds to last at least twelve months, and right now our numbers say that our peak need is less than $0.5M, but I want to have a bigger cushion,” he said.

On another note, Harris questioned the accuracy of O'Gara's statement (in the LinuxGram article) that “a lot of embedded engineers regard Linux as 'that operating system for pimple-faced computer science nerds dressed in T-shirts they [bought] at the last Star Trek convention.' “

The LinuxGram.com story can be found here.

 
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