In June 2016, Antoine Balaresque, the cofounder and CEO of the hot new startup Lily Robotics, stood before a room of business students at Berkeley's Haas School of Business, ready to reveal the PowerPoint slides that had made him an instant startup celebrity. Wearing the ubiquitous Silicon Valley uniform of a T-shirt and jeans, he appeared slightly bashful, with unruly hair and a boyish face still round in the cheeks. He seemed self-conscious about being feted by the room of business school students. Jessica Pishko is a San Francisco-based journalist who writes frequently about incarceration and social justice issues. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter. The presentation began like most of Balaresque's talks, with the Lily Drone promotional video: A slick film showed the drone swooping through the air, capturing footage of users engaged in a series of outdoor adventures. When the video finished, Balaresque began to recount the origin story of his "flying camera." It started in 2013, with a family trip to Yosemite National Park, during which Balaresque's mother took a group photo.

Lily Robotics, the defunct manufacturer of the world's first "selfie drone", is being sued over allegations that it faked product shots and misled consumers about the capability of its prototype devices. The lawsuit alleges that videos on Lily's website, presented as though they had been taken by the drone, were in fact shot by a mixture of GoPro cameras and DJI drones, a competitor model that costs up to four times as much and requires a skilled filmmaker to manually control the camera. The San Francisco District Attorney's (SFDA) office filed the case on Thursday, the day after Lily announced it was shutting down and refunding customers who had pre-ordered its drone at prices ranging from $499 to $899. Promotional videos detailed a number of groundbreaking capabilities of the Lily drone: the ability to take off from, and land on, a user's outstretched hand; a waterproof casing to enable water-based launches; and most impressively, autopilot mode that could allow the drone to follow the user at a set distance and automatically film them. In the videos, a drone operating under the autopilot setting was shown following people engaged in extreme sports such as snowboarding and white water kayaking.

Lily Robotics, which promised a autonomous flying camera, is shutting down operations. Lily Robotics, the makers of an autonomous flying camera that launched with great fanfare and garnered $34 million in pre-orders, is dead. The San Francisco-drone company said in an email to customers that it was unable to find more financing to enable manufacturing and production of its first drone. One source that was informed of the company's troubles said that Lily had been trying to bring in an additional $15 million after having already raised $15 million by Dec. 2015. "We have been racing against a clock of ever-diminishing funds," wrote the company's cofounders Henry Bradlow and Antoine Balaresque.

Universities have in recent years awakened to the fact that students can help them make money through more than just tuition and board. Stanford University started investing in students' start-ups in 2013. Harvard University does the same through its Xfund. Last year, the University of California launched a 250-million venture fund to invest in companies that grow out of the UC system. Now, UC Berkeley is getting in on the game -- through a new fund led by 24-year-old Los Angeles native Jeremy Fiance.