Hardware is hard. Building a hardware startup is even harder. The good news is that the staggering amount of innovation in rapid prototyping, 3D printing and backend-as-a-service platforms has made ha
About a year ago, Aileen Lee from Cowboy Ventures wrote her seminal piece on billion-dollar startups, now widely called "unicorns." At the time, she found 39 U.S.-based software companies fewer than 1
So far HAX startups have run 20 successful campaigns, making us the most prolific investor in crowdfunded hardware projects. As active participants and keen observers, we identified a few ideas that c
Nest and Oculus got acquired for billions, Jawbone and GoPro are going IPO, multiple projects are crossing the $1m bar on KickStarter. Something is happening in hardware.
Yet many investors from an
2014 is starting off with a bang for hardware. The $3.2B <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/13/google-just-bought-connected-device-company-nest-for-3-2b-in-cash/">acquisition of Nest</a>, a four
We can differentiate several steps in the life of a hardware startup: concept, minimum functional prototype (MFP), complete functional prototype (CFP), design for manufacture (DFM), first factory run
If the printing press was about "anyone can read," the web about "anyone can write," the hardware ecosystem changed enough to say today "anyone can build." This idea - that anyone can build - is the c