kickstarter
(15)
Ian Kung and the case for a better pen
After years at HP and Apple, Ian Kung co-founded Adonit to give tablet users a more precise way to work. The pen was small; the decisions behind it reached from Taipei to Texas, app developers, and customers around the world.
Yancey Strickler’s next act is in the small print
He helped artists ask the crowd for money. Now Kickstarter cofounder Yancey Strickler is working on a harder question: who gets to own the creative life?
Julianna He and the Art of Taking Less
After trying more than 20 laptop stands, MOFT founder Julianna He decided the office should pack smaller. A folding stand became the starting point for a business built around how people work, carry, and create.
Perry Chen and the concert that never happened
A show he couldn’t afford to stage gave Perry Chen the idea for Kickstarter. His work since then keeps returning to a practical question: what would help people make the things they care about?
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.
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.