Smart earbud startup Doppler Labs Inc. is history, closing its doors after running out of money when its product failed to sell.

Founded in 2013, the San Francisco-based company designed an “augmented reality” pair of earbuds called Here One that included a built-in microphone. It allowed certain sounds through while intelligently filtering other sounds out. In one example, users could listen to music while riding their bike but still hear car horns or other important sounds around them — quite clearly, a solution looking for a problem given that almost no one bought them.

Doppler had attempted to shift its technology toward people with hearing difficulties, but it proved too little, too late.

Instead of accepting that it had produced something no one wanted, the company instead blamed venture capital funds, saying in a statement on its website that it had taken “hundreds of meetings in an attempt to secure the necessary capital to continue running our business and build our next product – which would have been a true alternative to traditional hearing aids. However, we couldn’t find the needed capital to develop another complex hardware product.”

Sites such as Wired spun the company’s downfall as some sort of horrible tragedy. But the fact remains that Doppler Labs burned through $51 million in venture capital funding in its four short years of existence and managed to bring to market only one product that no one wanted to buy.

The founders of the company did show a small amount of grace, saying that they were going to release an app they had been designing that assists the small number of people who had purchased their earbuds to use them as a hearing aid. The app is exclusive to Apple Inc.’s iOS and not available for Android users.

Update: The folks from Doppler Labs didn’t like being called out for their epic failure and they’ve claimed there is inaccuracies in this post so this is what they’ve sent us – “Here One is Doppler Labs’ third product: the first being DUBS Actoustic Filters – which we sold hundreds of thousands of units of, and the second of which was Here Active Listening, which was named one of TIME’s best inventions of 2015.”

The fact that as as a company they failed was apparently lost on  them, but given they asked “We would greatly appreciate it if you update the article so that it is at a minimum factually correct,” we did.

Image: Doppler Labs