Yep!
Lots more info from Kouthoofd himself: Teenage Engineering OP-1 - #811 by PeterHanes
Worth a read!
“ Around 1999/2000 I was doing the final work on the MonoMachine and had daily discussions with Daniel Hansson about what machine to do next. I told Daniel about my dream of a machine I have sketched on, based on the Roland SH-101 but in a pocket format. Daniel loved the idea, but was concerned about the battery power and the overall performance of a machine in that size. Remember that this was 10 years ago, and the technology wasn’t quite there yet. So he told me to continue to sketch up a concept, but keep it more or less outside Elektron.
Anyway, I started to work on the machine as a side project. (Daniel and the Elektron team had another vision about a more live / dj sampling machine (UW that later bacame the Octatrack I guess) I did a lot of sketches of the functionality and renderings. And finally Daniel called me one day and said Elektron had a collaboration with Evolution to make a portable machine / controller. As you might guessed, when we presented the stuff, they thought we were insane and rejected all of it. It was too expensive. Impossible to manufacture, no clear target group etc. That could have been the end of story, but it wasn’t.
As some of you know a tragic incident happend a few years later. In 2007 Daniel died in a car accident. He was one of my best friends and it was a great loss. He had called me just a couple of weeks before and wanted to show me a sketch of a new machine he had been working on for some time. (I don’t know what he had in mind, but I guess the Octatrack is in a close direction, even if I know there’s at least one other great talent behind that machine.)
At that time me and some friends had just started Teenage Engineering. I was still doing some work for Elektron, but when Daniel passed away, it wasn’t just the same for me and I guess Elektron also wanted move on and build a strong team in Gotheburg, which I think was right. So the opportunity the make a portable machine was more or less gone”