“Irreconcilable Differences:” Zano CEO Bails on Beleaguered Drone Project

It’s not easy being Europe’s most well-funded Kickstarter project.

Zano, the crowdfunded wunderkind of Welsh start-up Torquing Group Ltd, has been plagued with delivery delays and the selfie drone project looked ready to crash and burn Wednesday after CEO and co-founder Ivan Reedman resigned.

Described in its 2014 Kickstarter page as an “ultra-portable, personal aerial photography and video capture platform” capable of autonomous flight, Zano retailed at $300 and stunned the crowdsourcing world by raising $3.4 million in two months.

As of last month, Reece Crowther, the Torquing’s head of marketing, wrote on Kickstarter that the company had shipped just 600 of the more than 15,000 units that had been ordered.

“It is with great sadness I write to let you know that I have resigned from Torquing Group,” stated Reedman on the company’s forum. “My resignation is due to personal health issues and irreconcilable differences.”

“To say I am devastated pales when compared to what I am feeling. The last 7 years of my life are in [Torquing], everything I have worked so hard for is in [Torquing] and to no longer be able to be part of everything I have built only makes me suffer even more,” Reedman added.

Writing for Ars Technica, Cyrus Farivar noted that several customers vented to him about delays and problems with Zano:

“An Italian backer who spent €250 ($267) on a never-received Zano said that he has been sending the company frequent e-mails with no reply. ‘Very, very few backers received their Zano; you may know already that they failed to give pledges to backers, instead due to ‘logistic problems’ they begun to ship pre-orders first!’ Frederico Bernardi e-mailed. ‘All the production-schedule that Reece from [Torquing Group] or Ivan wrote were false. NO ONE reported a nice flight experience. NOTHING promised work: it even fails to fly like a $50 cheap drone.’”

Listed as a “nano” class drone, Zano weighs in at 1.94 ounces and measures 2.5″ x 2.5. The prototype will include IR obstacle avoidance, 5 MP HD camera, audio amplifiers, a 32-bit processor and 10-15 minutes of continuous flight per charge.

“When we began work on Zano, our goal was to make aerial photography and video capture truly accessible to everyone,” Crowther said. “This meant making Zano small and lightweight, yet durable enough to take with you anywhere. Intelligent enough so no piloting skills were required, and most of all, pricing Zano at a point that makes it affordable.”

Apparently, Zano may have simply priced itself out of the realm of possibility.