After raising $72M, Sirin Labs sold just under $10M of its $14K+ Solarin secure smartphones, now plans to pivot with $20M in the bank, laying off ~30 people
Context & Ripple Effects
Sirin Labs raised $72M to build Solarin as a privacy-first 'Rolls-Royce' handset, then launched it at $13,800 with chip-to-chip AES encryption from KoolSpan. Less than a year on, the ledger reads: just under $10M in cumulative sales against that war chest.
The failure is not isolated. Court documents already showed the Blackphone maker Silent Circle had cut 15% of its staff amid an uncertain future — meaning both marquee entrants in ultra-secure handsets are now retrenching within months of each other.
First-order effects
- About 30 Sirin Labs employees are laid off immediately, shrinking the payroll so the remaining $20M can fund a pivot rather than continued Solarin production.
- KoolSpan loses its highest-profile showcase device, weakening the reference customer for its embedded crypto chips in consumer hardware.
Second-order effects
- Silent Circle's earlier layoffs plus Sirin's retreat leave no credible standalone premium secure-phone vendor standing, forcing enterprise buyers who wanted dedicated hardware back toward mainstream devices hardened by software.
- Investors in 'luxury hardware' startups get a fresh cautionary datapoint — $72M deployed against sub-$10M revenue — tightening diligence on any pitch that prices a niche device above flagship flagships by an order of magnitude.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, secure-mobile value migrates from bespoke devices to software and licensing layers bolted onto commodity phones — the path Jolla chose when it closed its Series C for a Sailfish licensing business after its own layoffs.
- A consolidation of the privacy-phone niche around OS-level and service-level security providers, rather than handset makers, would end the category of independently financed ultra-premium secure hardware.
The trend: Ultra-secure smartphones are proving unviable as standalone hardware businesses, pushing their well-funded makers into layoffs and pivots toward software-based security.