IPIX, as recently as last summer, seemed to be doing fairly well. The company had received a loan of $5 million, and was advancing what it had told to the security industry trade press what it called a "gigapixel" camera. And while $5 million was coming in, much more was going on out at the company, which was better known for developing cutting-edge video technologies than actually making a profit on such ideas.
And then the walls crumbled. Creditors came calling as the company declared bankruptcy and as board members jumped ship. The former Tennessee company that had bounded out to California and then to Washington, D.C., on the strength of "immersive imaging", was falling apart.
Now, months later, and after a court auction this past Friday, it seems that there were a number of companies with a great deal of continued interest in IPIX technology.
While bidders for the company's core technologies that were in development were largely comprised of former IPIX executives, it's still not known who the "player" was that dropped $3.6 million to land IPIX intellectual property, including the aforementioned gigapixel camera system (which IPIX CEO Clara Conti had pitched as an aerial surveillance tool for incident management). At the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, the highest bid was accepted for an anonymous company represented by bankrupty lawyer Robert Gephard, a partner with the law firm Sedgwick, Detert, Moran and Arnold out of San Francisco.
The bid was significantly higher than an earlier $2.2 million offer for the companies intellectual property, which included 24 patents, and may have been enough to pay back IPIX's creditors. It was just enough to edge out bidding competitors, including Image Corporation of America, a firm created by Luminetx/Snowflake Technologies and former IPIX CEO Jim Phillips.
The identity of the anonymous company that purchased much of IPIX's innovations will likely be available in the next few days, though the company was preliminarily identified in the Knoxville News Sentinel as a national "blue chip".
For a detailed report on the IPX bankruptcy court proceedings from Friday, see the Knoxville News-Sentinel's article.
