About a month after announcing temporary layoffs of most of its employees, Finnish smartphone software company Jolla says it has closed a Series C investment round, giving the company enough money to keep going.. at least for a while.
That means Jolla plans to continue developing its Sailfish operating system for smartphones and tablets.
Jolla was founded by a group including former Nokia employees interested in continuing to work on a Linux-based mobile operating system after Nokia made the switch to Windows Phone and sold its phone business to Microsoft.
Sailfish OS is an evolution of the Maemo/MeeGo software developer by Nokia. But Sailfish has a design language all its own, as well as support for running Android apps.
So far only one smartphone has shipped with Sailfish OS, but the software has been ported to run on some third-party devices. Jolla has pretty much given up on developing its own hardware at this point, and is instead working to find hardware makers interested in licensing its software for their phones and tablets.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Jolla chairman Antii Saarnio says the company’s next step will involve trying to get employees who were recently laid off or who resigned to come back to the company.
Jolla also hasn’t yet decided what to do about the long-delayed Jolla Tablet which has yet to ship to backers of a crowdfunding campaign. It’s possible that development of the tablet could pick up where it left off. But it’s also possible that Jolla could cancel the project and refund backers of the crowdfunding campaign.