Troy, Michigan based startup Apprenda is shutting operations an investor says. Venture capital firm Safeguard Scientifics has invested $22.1 million in Apprenda since 2013. It held a 29 percent ownership stake in the startup according to corporate controller Dave Kille.

During a recent call, Kille was quoted saying “Apprenda recently decided to wind down its operations.” Another executive added

“It’s pretty unusual for a company to gain the level of traction that Apprenda did, and then ultimately not successfully market itself for exit. One point, there were some very significant players who were more than sniffing around.”

Apprenda was a cloud startup co-founded by a former Morgan Stanley IT developer, Sinclair Schuller. The startup was trying to help big companies move their mission-critical applications to the cloud. It initially tried to build its own cloud product, but switched to integrating cloud services with “containers.” It focused on container technology called Kubernetes.