PixelMax

» see pixelmax.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

PixelMax was never the company's name. The company was Imagin3D Ltd, incorporated in Manchester on 22 May 2018, and what it did before any of this was model virtual factory production lines with live machine data piped in from the real ones. Lockdown stopped those projects. So the team built a virtual copy of Bonded Warehouse, the Manchester building they worked out of, and that became the product. The virtual workplace launched publicly on 30 September 2021.

It ran in a browser with no download and no headset, delivered by cloud pixel streaming out of Unreal Engine. You walked an avatar into a persistent 3D office in the morning, music playing, on the theory that arriving somewhere is worth something a video window cannot give you. The pitch was openly anti-Zoom. Their line on national television in February 2022 was that we were not meant to exist in 2D and these video calls just don't feel natural.

The customers were real and several of them were large. UEFA ran fan engagement for the Women's Champions League Final on the PixelMax platform when it could not run it in a stadium, then came back and commissioned two more. Alder Hey Children's Hospital had a digital twin of its radiology department built so that young patients could walk through the machines before facing the real ones, shipped under the name ALDERPLAY. The Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre in Sheffield got a building generated out of a Revit file with live sensor data in it, air quality and which seats were occupied.

Praetura Ventures led two million pounds in during March 2021, with ACT Capital Partners and Solid Bond Capital alongside, following a 250,000 pound pre-seed. Headcount reached around forty. It won a Great British Entrepreneur Award in 2021 and a Digital City Award in 2022, and it placed 62nd on the Startups 100 list.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how the copy changed ~

The clearest record of what happened to this company is its own homepage, read three years apart. November 2021: "The hybrid workplace of the future. Hybrid working is more than video conferencing. Hybrid working is now a necessity." March 2024, the same page: "We make the metaverse, easy. Empower your journey into the metaverse with PixelMax, your trusted cloud streaming provider."

Hybrid working had left the headline entirely. What arrived in its place was a self-serve store and an Unreal SDK, which is a company that used to sell bespoke virtual offices now selling the tooling and the hosting to whoever still wanted to build one. There was no blog post announcing that change of business. It is simply what the site says.

~ the eighteen-month market ~

Everyone I worked with spent 2020 and 2021 on Teams and Zoom, in Ankara the same as everywhere else, and nobody ever proposed that we should instead be walking avatars into a building. The market PixelMax was selling into did genuinely exist, for roughly eighteen months, and it existed as a line in an HR budget rather than as something employees were asking for. When the offices reopened the line closed. I am reading this one from a distance, though the customers were reading it from about the same distance.

~ the paperwork ~

The liquidation is the best-documented part of the entire story. The Gazette published notice of a creditors' meeting on 8 July 2024, scheduled for 10:15 in the morning on 23 July. The meeting happened, the winding up commenced that day, and Gareth Howarth of Path Business Recovery in Manchester was appointed liquidator on the same date. The resolutions were filed a fortnight later. The company is still in liquidation rather than dissolved, with a liquidator's receipts and payments statement filed as recently as September 2025.

The board had drained out ahead of it. Rob Hilton, who incorporated the company in 2018, resigned in June 2022. Praetura's portfolio director left the board in October 2022. Shay O'Carroll, the public face of the company for three years, resigned on 12 June 2024, six weeks before the creditors met. BusinessCloud had been running PixelMax stories since 2021 and ran nothing about the ending, and neither did anybody else.

~ the epitaph they wrote themselves ~

PixelMax kept a page called How we work, laying out a six-step process for a client engagement. Step six was Lifetime support, and it read: "We're not going anywhere. Whatever you need, new functionality, more scale, a question answered, we'll be there." That page was archived in July 2021. The last capture of pixelmax.com in any form is 25 March 2024, four months before the liquidators arrived, and the host has answered nothing since.

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