// WIRED US/UK — MONDO
Roli Has Fallen Apart—and Left Customers Holding the Bag
Roli, the company behind expressive, touch-sensitive music devices like the Seaboard and Roli Blocks, has collapsed.
Although it hasn't been officially announced, Roli reportedly ousted its CEO and founder, Roland Lamb, earlier this year. Since then, Roli has all but dissolved. (In August, a new company called Instrumental Intelligence was registered with the UK government under Lamb's name, a potential move by the founder to acquire Roli's assets).
On Monday, Roli emailed users that two licensed insolvency practitioners were appointed joint administrators of Roli on October 20. The company went into administration, the UK process that manages corporate insolvency. This is the second time Roli has gone bankrupt.
That has left a small but bereft community of customers with no word on getting the products they paid for. The Roli community has expressed sadness, anger, or outright confusion. In Facebook groups, the r/Roli subreddit, and other forums, dismayed users have struggled to find recourse for Roli equipment purchases ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars. The Roli subreddit has been awash with posts from customers who say they paid for orders months or years ago and have received no response or refund since then.
Existing owners also worry about the long-term impact. Roli instruments rely heavily on proprietary software launchers and companion apps to connect, map sounds, and configure settings. While the hardware still functions, users fear that lack of software support will eventually leave their gear bricked.
Roli has not publicly communicated about its future strategy with customers. The company did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment; Lamb did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Roli’s primary financial backers, investment firms TriplePoint Capital and Hoxton Ventures, also did not respond.
The company started in 2009 but really took off after musician Pharrell Williams invested in 2017 and Sony’s Innovation Fund in 2018. Musicians like Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess supported and touted Roli’s gadgets. Ryan Gosling’s character played a Seaboard Grand in the 2016 movie La La Land. In the late 2010s, the tech and the company were hailed as a hit.
That tune changed in 2020. The British government’s Future Fund—a taxpayer-funded relief package issued to help businesses during the pandemic—partially bailed out Roli from a Covid-19-induced financial crisis. Even then, Roli went into administration for the first time in 2021. It survived by relaunching as Luminary Roli and focusing on music-learning devices like the light-up Lumi keyboard and the Airwave, a digital theremin that doubled as an AI piano teacher.
Through all of that, customers have had issues with how the company communicates. Users who ordered the Lumi keyboard found orders unexpectedly delayed, with no indication from the company on what was happening.
“One of the problems they have had ever since I started with the Kickstarter is communication and explaining things—telling people what's going on,” Lluís Gerard, a YouTuber who has reviewed Roli products for years under the handle WasabiNoise, tells WIRED. “There's always been too much secrecy about things, or then you'd realize, oh, there are these delays.”