Tagged: kickstarter
14 results
Ricky Choi
Ricky Choi is the co-founder and CEO of Outerspace, a brand-centric 3PL that runs picking, packing, kitting and shipping for direct-to-consumer companies out of a 200,000+ sq ft campus in northern New Jersey and additional coasts. Before Outerspace, he co-founded Nice Laundry, a Kickstarter-launched premium socks and underwear brand that set an opening-day backer record in fashion. He is a Wharton graduate who worked in venture capital and at LivingSocial before starting companies of his own.
Jaclyn Fu
Jaclyn Fu is the co-founder and co-CEO of Pepper, the direct-to-consumer bra brand built for small-chested women that grew from a Kickstarter funded in 10 hours into an eight-figure company that has sold more than one million bras. A UC Berkeley graduate and former product marketer at Mozilla, Etsy and Conversocial, she turned four words scribbled on a road trip - 'bras for Asian Americans' - into a movement to redefine how small chests are seen. She and co-founder Lia Winograd landed on Forbes' 2020 30 Under 30 list for Retail & Commerce.
CANDY HOUSE
CANDY HOUSE, Inc. is the consumer-hardware company behind Sesame, the retrofit smart lock that mounts over an existing deadbolt with adhesive tape and turns a smartphone, fingerprint, card, PIN or face into a key. Founded in 2014 by Stanford engineer Jerming Gu and famous for a 2015 Kickstarter that raised about $1.4M, the company built an open ecosystem around SesameOS - locks, touch and face readers, a coin-sized Matter hub, sensors and finger robots - aimed at making smart-home access affordable, rental-friendly and developer-open.
Jerming Gu
Jerming Gu is the Taiwanese founder and CEO of CANDY HOUSE, the company behind SESAME, the smart lock that clamps onto an existing deadbolt and turns a smartphone into a key. He started the company as a Stanford mechanical engineering master's student in 2014 with co-founder Jongho Shin, then turned a 3D-printed dorm-room prototype into a Kickstarter phenomenon that raised roughly $1.4 million in 2015. After a decade building a dominant smart-lock business in Japan - including funding from ITOCHU and a strategic alliance with lock maker MIWA - he relaunched CANDY HOUSE in the US and Canada in 2025 with a lineup spanning SESAME 5, face recognition, palm-vein biometrics and Matter-compatible hubs.
Will Nitze
Will Nitze is the founder and CEO of IQBAR, a brain-and-body nutrition brand he built from a Kickstarter campaign into a nine-figure CPG company selling plant-based protein bars, hydration mixes, and instant coffee in more than 10,000 retail doors. A Harvard psychology and neuroscience graduate who once sold software to oil-and-gas companies, he formulated his first products with no food-science background, scaled IQBAR past 100 million bars sold, and now hosts the founder podcast Eating Glass.
Jake Miller
Jake Miller is the founder of Fellow, a San Francisco-based premium coffee gear company known for design-forward products like the Stagg EKG electric kettle, Ode Brew Grinder, and Carter Move Mug. He launched Fellow as a Stanford MBA class project in 2013, weathered 73 investor rejections and a failed first product, before building a nine-figure consumer brand sold in 45+ countries and backed by $42M in funding. Miller's mission is to transform everyday coffee routines into meaningful rituals by bridging the gap between specialty roasters and home baristas.
Simone Giertz
Simone Giertz is a Swedish-born inventor, YouTuber, and product designer best known as the 'Queen of Shitty Robots' - a self-styled title earned by building hilariously dysfunctional machines that helped her (and millions of viewers) overcome perfectionism. She parlayed viral robot comedy into a serious design career, founding Yetch Studio in 2022, whose products include the Every Day Calendar (sold at MoMA) and the Laundry Chair - a swivel-rail accent chair for 'half-dirty' clothes that raised nearly $1 million on Kickstarter in 2026.
David Jiang
David Jiang (Gonglue Jiang) is the co-founder and CEO of VITURE, the XR glasses company that captured 52% of the U.S. smart glasses market in Q4 2024 and raised $100M in Series B funding in 2025. A Harvard-trained human-computer interaction designer who worked on Google Glass and led AR at Rokid, he founded VITURE in 2021 with a single conviction: that wearable screens would replace the smartphone as the primary entertainment and productivity interface. VITURE One raised $3.1M on Kickstarter in one month, surpassing Oculus's prior record, and VITURE Pro later outranked Meta Ray-Ban on Amazon.
Nathan Xu
Nathan Xu (also known as Xu Gao) is the co-founder and CEO of Plaud AI, the company behind the world's best-selling AI voice recorder and notetaker. A serial entrepreneur who failed three times before hitting gold, Xu bootstrapped Plaud from a Kickstarter campaign in 2023 to $180M+ ARR by 2025 - without a single dollar of venture capital. His credit-card-sized Plaud Note and wearable NotePin devices, which transcribe, summarize, and analyze conversations in 112 languages, have shipped to over 1.5 million users in 170+ countries. Based in San Francisco with roots in Wuhan, China, Xu represents a new breed of transpacific founder betting that the next great hardware platform fits in your pocket - or around your neck.
Eric Migicovsky
Eric Migicovsky is a Canadian hardware entrepreneur who invented the Pebble smartwatch in 2012, raising $10.26M on Kickstarter in the most-funded campaign of its time. After Pebble's $40M sale to Fitbit in 2016, he served as a Y Combinator partner, then co-founded Beeper — a universal messaging app that sparked a major Apple antitrust investigation before selling to Automattic for $125M in 2024. Now back to his roots, he's reviving the Pebble brand under Core Devices with fully open-source hardware and software.
Arman Assadi
Arman Assadi is a serial entrepreneur, AI founder, and copywriter who left Google in 2014 with a one-way ticket to Cuba and never looked back. He co-created the EVO Planner (the most-funded planner in crowdfunding history), built 13 different seven-figure product launches for clients like Neil Patel and Jeff Walker, and now leads Steno.ai — an AI digital twins platform backed by Tony Robbins that lets experts scale their voice and personality across web, mobile, and SDK. He co-hosts the Alfalfa Podcast and has spent a decade on a mission to democratize wisdom.
Haje Jan Kamps
Haje Jan Kamps is a Dutch-born journalist, serial founder, and pitch coach who turned a decade covering startups for TechCrunch into an AI-powered pitch deck review service. Best known for his long-running 'Pitch Deck Teardown' series analyzing real decks from companies that raised $125K to $500M, he now runs Pitch Guide - an AI tool that reviews startup pitch decks against 250+ criteria. A former hardware founder (Triggertrap), VC portfolio director (Bolt), and prolific author of 8+ books, he brings rare operator-journalist-investor perspective to early-stage startup fundraising.
O-Boy Satellite Smartwatch
O-Boy is the world's first satellite-connected emergency rescue smartwatch, built for adventurers and professionals who operate beyond cellular coverage. Designed by Belgian studio Futurewave for startup LifeLineSat, it lets you send GPS-pinpointed rescue signals, custom messages, or live location tracking directly via satellite - no phone required. Think of it as the emergency button the wilderness has always needed, worn on your wrist.
Yarbo M Series Robot
Yarbo M Series is a modular, autonomous yard robot that replaces four seasonal machines - lawn mower, snow blower, leaf collector, and edge trimmer - with one tracked, wire-free platform. Unveiled at CES 2026 and raising $2.6M on Kickstarter (26x its goal), the M Series uses nRTK GPS, LiDAR, and onboard AI to navigate without buried boundary wires, handles slopes up to 35 degrees, and operates year-round from -13F to 113F.