Pollen owes £75m to collectors with just one potential purchaser in sight (report)

Pollen, a UK-based journey and music-related experiences firm, is going through £75 million ($85 million) in money owed owed to collectors because it struggles to hold out its restructuring with no different curiosity aside from one potential purchaser.

Particulars of Pollen’s money owed had been printed by software program engineering industry-focused The Pragmatic Engineer on Friday (October 21), which cited a report despatched by Pollen’s directors to collectors.

The report revealed that the corporate obtained a $2.5 million buyout provide on August 9, only a day earlier than it went into administration. The provide was reportedly turned down by the corporate’s administrators following discussions with secured creditor, International Progress Capital.

New York-headquartered restructuring and insolvency specialist Kroll, tapped to manage Pollen’s restructuring, despatched out a teaser doc to 154 potential patrons, and whereas 14 indicated curiosity within the firm — together with Pollen’s know-how stack, the Pollen model and shares in Abode Information Ltd. — none of them proceeded to make a proposal, The Pragmatic Engineer mentioned.

The unique purchaser that made the $2.5 million provide then lowered its bid to $500 million on September 14 and proposed to incorporate Simply Experiences Ltd., doing enterprise as Trippr, within the acquisition. Two weeks later, the undisclosed purchaser reportedly halved its most up-to-date bid to $250,000.

A sale of Pollen may occur quickly with no different curiosity aside from one get together, until that potential purchaser drops out from its bid, the report mentioned.

The £75 million debt that Pollen owes to collectors coated the next, based on The Pragmatic Engineer:

• £18.6 million owed to secured creditor, International Progress Capital
• £607,000 to preferential collectors, together with workers’ claims of pay in arrears, vacation pay and pension arrears
• £59.4 million owned to unsecured collectors, consisting of distributors and funds, workers pensions, HSBC overdraft, HSBC financial institution mortgage, shareholders with claims, convertible loans, American Specific, and worker bills

The report additional listed software program corporations which have but to obtain funds from Pollen together with challenge administration agency Monday.com, messaging platform Twilio, cloud firm AWS, Zoom, Datadog, Vercel, Mixpanel, Consumer Testing, Retool, Cobalt Labs, Queue-it, Snowflake, Airtable, Falcon.io, Grammarly, Salesforce and Trustpilot.

Pollen additionally had unpaid charges to recruitment companions like Deep Abacus and Velocity International, and different service suppliers together with software program supply agency Thoughtworks, wherein it owes £1.1 million, auditing agency PwC, journey providers supplier Concur, and model partnerships agency Graphite Media, amongst many others.

The filings revealed how Pollen had managed to lift $150 million in a collection C funding spherical in April regardless of racking up money owed. The corporate’s troubles have emerged after it laid off greater than 150 workers in Might, only a month after the fundraising that attracted cash from traders Kindred, Northzone, Sienna Capital, Backed and Draper Spirit.

In a press release again in August when it introduced its restructuring with Kroll, the corporate’s guardian Streetteam Software program, blamed its troubles on the “knock-on results of COVID-19 during the last two years, which decimated a lot of the journey sector.”

Streetteam additionally attributed its collapse to the tech inventory crash and shopper uncertainty amid world financial circumstances.Music Enterprise Worldwide