Uber for kids rides Shuddle, Inc. is no more with the company announcing it would close Friday due to an inability to raise more money to keep the service going.

Founded in 2014 at the height of “Uber for X” mania, Shuddle pitched itself as the safe and reliable ride service busy parents had been waiting for.

The company hand-selected drivers through an extensive screening process and promised to provide the best service for families to get where they needed to go, safely and on time.

Shuddle is reported to have had 32 employees and provided more than 65,000 rides in the Bay Area, and its business grew by more than 50 percent in the last six months.

The company itself blamed venture capital firms and the market for their demise, with Chief Executive Officer Doug Alley saying in a statement “As we all have seen in today’s headlines, it is an extremely challenging environment for raising new capital … We worked hard with our existing investors to find new financial resources that would help us continue to grow. But, we could not raise the funding required to continue operations.”

Rubbish

There is no question that it’s become harder this year for companies to raise further capital, but despite the peak of the second great tech boom passing at some point last year, there’s still plenty of money available to be raised out there, and indeed, we write about companies raising funds here at SiliconANGLE every week.

But here’s the catch: the throw money at every startup that moves frenzy no longer exists, and the companies raising money in this environment are primarily good companies with solid business plans which are going places.

Shuddle, on the other hand, was rubbish.

Despite ample opportunity, and clearly plenty of staff, the company never expanded outside of the Bay Area in its two and a half years of existence.

The market for shuttling kids around was always going to be a limited one as people either couldn’t afford to use the service, or alternatively if they could they probably already had a nanny to do the job anyway; it’s really only a fairly narrow market of those who have enough money to afford to have their kids use it but don’t have enough money to use alternatives instead.

Given a narrow niche market, Shuddle needed to expand to have any chance of building enough scale to succeed, and they never got that far.

Prior to closure, Shuddle burned through $12.2 million raised over two rounds from Accel, Forerunner Ventures, Comcast Ventures, RRE Ventures, Expansion Venture Capital and Semil Shah.

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