They did raise funding. It's unclear to me what their business model would have been (compete with Vercel?), and maybe the struggle to find one was why they decided to go for an acquisition.
I remember they had a really expensive subscription model (even for solo developers). They were looking to get traction based on the reputation of the founders and other tech influencers (like Kent C Dodds) in the react community.
Personally I felt that they were not very clear on who their target audience was and what was the niche that they were trying to address to transition from good to great dev experience.
>They were looking to get traction based on the reputation of the founders and other tech influencers (like Kent C Dodds) in the react community.
This had the opposite effect for me.
I bought Dodds' Epic React course and it seemed to have been kicked to the curb in favor of joining and boosting Remix.
I remember some important course updates were pending, and seemed to come to a standstill while his entire blog was re-written in Remix.
Then a month or so later he joined that team. I really liked his prior educational content, in this it seemed like paid promotion for a particular framework.
The VC raise and bringing Dodds on seemed like peak (hopefully!) hypecycle for frontend JS stuff.
