As we get ready to launch our third season of “Into the Forge,” the Lemnos podcast, we are taking a moment to look back at the wisdom shared from the first two seasons. We ask each founder the same 10 questions, and their answers shine a light on the diversity, frustrations, and joys of the hardware startup experience. Question Nine: What advice would you offer to other founders?
As we get ready to launch our third season of “Into the Forge,” the Lemnos podcast, we are taking a moment to look back at the wisdom shared from the first two seasons. We ask each founder the same 10 questions, and their answers shine a light on the diversity, frustrations, and joys of the hardware startup experience. Question Seven – What has been the most surprising thing about this process of bringing your idea to the market? Question Eight – What’s the hardest part of being a hardware startup founder?
As we get ready to launch our third season of “Into the Forge,” the Lemnos podcast, we are taking a moment to look back at the wisdom shared from the first two seasons. We ask each founder the same 10 questions, and their answers shine a light on the diversity, frustrations, and joys of the hardware startup experience. Question Four: What kind of engagement did you have with mentors, peers, or incubator colleagues early on?
As we get ready to launch our third season of “Into the Forge,” the Lemnos podcast, we are taking a moment to look back at the wisdom shared from the first two seasons. We ask each founder the same 10 questions, and their answers shine a light on the diversity, frustrations, and joys of the hardware startup experience. Question Three: How did you decide what would be your first product?
As we get ready to launch our third season of “Into the Forge,” the Lemnos podcast, we are taking a moment to look back at the wisdom shared from the first two seasons. We ask each founder the same 10 questions, and their answers shine a light on the diversity, frustrations, and joys of the hardware startup experience. Question Two: Had you worked on hardware projects before this startup?
As we get ready to launch our third season of “Into the Forge,” the Lemnos podcast, we are taking a moment to look back at the wisdom shared from the first two seasons. We ask each founder the same 10 questions, and their answers shine a light on the diversity, frustrations, and joys of the hardware startup experience. Question One – Why did you start your hardware company?
We are seeking the earliest stage entrepreneurs—the innovators. We’re excited to meet future entrepreneurs based in the United States who have led teams either at larger companies or at a previous startup.
Lemnos has been investing in great hardware startups for over seven years. When we started our firm, we focused on companies located in or willing to relocate to the Bay Area. But a few years ago, we opened our geographic aperture, starting with a company in Los Angeles. Now we are embracing the entire US.
Lemnos has built a reputation over the last seven years as the premier partner for hardware entrepreneurs working on complex systems. We focus on full-stack startups that sense and/or actuate the physical world, and “full-stack” includes software.
We are excited to announce the re-opening of the Lemnos Machine Shop! Learn all about it and some lessons learned from the woman in charge of the upgrade, Shivani Torres, Lemnos Associate.
Robots and AI help eliminate some of the repetition involved in tasks that don’t spark creativity or require meaningful use of our brains. Deploying robots to take care of mundane tasks frees up time for more engaging, valuable work that empowers people to engage in more satisfying, meaningful uses of their time. Learn more from Linda Pouliot, CEO and Founder at Dishcraft Robotics.
We recently expanded and rebuilt our shop, and I couldn’t be happier with the improvements. Shivani, our Associate, really brought the project home, and now both our portfolio teams and Lemnos staff can enjoy the benefits of her hard work. Learn more about it!
At Lemnos we help our portfolio companies transition from two or three-person founding teams to growing companies with strong functional capabilities and process. In this article, we highlight career paths for business-oriented founders or CEOs as your company grows.
Hiring an Operations Manager early on might be the secret to your success. We help you understand why and how to hire the best Ops Manager for your company.
Maintaining a real-time understanding of your startup’s engineering program is one of the most difficult challenges you face as hardware startup founder, and there comes a day when a founder must think about hiring an Engineering Product Manager.
You spend countless hours trying to figure out the when, why, and how of growing your team. But have you spent enough time deciding what role you will ultimately perform as your company matures?
We would like to welcome the newest member of our Lemnos team, Shivani Torres, Lemnos’s first Associate.
We would like to welcome the newest member of our Lemnos team, Rachel Sheinbein. Rachel is Lemnos’s newest Venture Partner, advising funded portfolio companies on topics such as fundraising and customer introductions and whatever else might be needed.
It is that time again—when we take a moment from finding and nurturing the best hardware startups to talk about what we are excited about this year. We believe the defining trend of 2018 will be applied robotics, but we are also excited about and invested in other arenas. Find out more here.
In Season 2 Episode 10, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Matt Delaney, co founder and CEO; Kevin Peterson, co-founder and software lead; and Jason Calaiaro, co-founder and hardware lead at Marble, a Lemnos portfolio company. Marble is creating a fleet of intelligent courier robots to reliably and securely transport goods people need and want.
In Season 2 Episode 9, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Giri Sreenivas, co-founder and CEO, and Dirk Sigurdson, co-founder and CTO of Privacy Labs, a Lemnos portfolio company. Privacy Labs is helping people be free, private, and secure online.
In Season 2 Episode 8, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Sankarshan Murthy, CEO and co-founder; Prahlad Athreya, co-founder; and Garrett Rayner, co-founder at Bumblebee Spaces, which is revolutionizing living spaces using robotics and AI.
In Season 2 Episode 7, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Josh Ouellette, co-founder and CEO, and Randy Shults, another co-founder of RavenOps, a Lemnos portfolio company. RavenOps takes inspiration from nature to build cooperative swarms of simple robots that outperform individual units in complex environments.
In Season 2 Episode 6, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Sébastien Boyer and Thomas Palomares, co-founders of FarmWise, a Lemnos portfolio company that recently announced a $5.7 million Seed round raise to transform farming.
In Season 2 Episode 5, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Dave Merrill, CEO and Clint Cope, co-founder of Elroy Air, a Lemnos portfolio company. Elroy Air recently announced that it had secured $4.6 million in seed funding to develop its large autonomous cargo delivery aircraft.
In Season 2 Episode 4, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Amir Hirsch, co-founder and CEO of Flybrix, a Lemnos portfolio company that recently partnered with Target to sell quad kits that let you make rebuildable, crash-friendly drones using LEGO bricks.
In Season 2 Episode 3, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Jon Hollander, CEO, and Eric Gregory, VP of Engineering, of Seriforge, a Lemnos portfolio company that automates carbon fiber fabrication for mass production, cutting manufacturing costs by up to 90%.
In Season 2 Episode 2, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Kavodel Ohiomoba and Andy Kittler, co-founders of FieldVision, a Lemnos portfolio company that builds an autonomous camera that automatically films any team sport.
In Season 2 Episode 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein talks with Noah Ready-Campbell of Built Robotics, a Lemnos portfolio company. Built recently announced $15 million in Series A funding to get its autonomous track loader to market.
Thursday we will launch Season Two of our podcast “Into the Forge”. We are excited about the hardware founders we have lined up. In this new season, you will hear a range of experiences and perspectives that will help you better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company.
Last week we hosted the fourth Sci-Fi Movie Ideation night at Lemnos. We watched “Iron Man,” our second live action movie selection, and in it we found inspiration around two core themes: the future of visualization and the future of robotics.
Last week we hosted the third Sci-Fi Movie Ideation night at Lemnos. We watched “Tomorrowland.” In terms of future technology speculation, it did not disappoint. Read which four themes came to the fore!
At Lemnos, we’re more excited than ever about the future of robotics, and we are putting our money where our mouths are. Over the past few months, we have explored the top-five robotics megatrends. Read all about them here.
Recent advancements in computation have opened doors not only in software, but also in hardware. Learn more about the most ubiquitous megatrend in robotics.
Storage may not be the sexiest megatrend in robotics, but it is critical to outperforming and out-adapting your competitors. Find out more about developments in storage and how they are changing robotics, as part of our series on robotics megatrends.
Computer vision has leapt from the lab into everyday life, transforming robotics and causing us, at Lemnos, to take notice. Learn more about this megatrend in robotics as part of our series.
The most advanced robots have the ability to sense and interact with their environments. That’s why advances in sensors are one of the five megatrends we have identified that will transform robotics startups. Learn more here.
Of all the robotics megatrends ubiquitous connectivity is the one that arrived fastest and that is already having a major impact in deployed robotics. Constant contact with their robots allows companies to ship the robots earlier in the design process and iterate faster than they could before. Learn more about this megatrend here.
We hosted the second Lemnos Sci-Fi Movie Night. Last time, we watched WALL-E. We wanted to continue the robotics theme, this time we chose Big Hero 6. Find out which four major ideas in the movie we thought were viable. (Unsurprisingly, given our interest in robotics, two of the four involve the future of robots.)
Jeremy recently spoke with The Financial Times about how the economies of scale in the self-driving car industry will bolster the field of robotics. You can listen to Jeremy’s comments on their podcast.
Historically there were two main types of robots: industrial and toy/home. But now the dual advances in sensors and connectivity are driving the emergence of cobots designed to interact with us.
Recently, we’ve been investing a lot in robotics. There are five megatrends that make this the right time to start a robotics company: Connectivity, Sensors, Computer Vision, Storage, and Computation.
Jeremy was on Bloomberg Technology yesterday talking with Caroline Hyde about Lemnos’s investment strategy. Quick overview on what we are investing in and why!
We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised our third, $50 million fund to support early-stage hardware and the growing software ecosystem surrounding the hardware renaissance.
Last week I hosted our first one featuring WALL-E. We asked the simple question “Which of these technologies could happen in the next five years?” Find out what we came up with here.
While CES is dominated by big companies and huge hype machines, the real star of the show are smaller companies who might never get “big enough” to warrant VC investment. And that isn’t just ok, it’s great.
A great business creates a virtual monopoly for a certain period of time. Usually this is not a true monopoly where the competition is prevented from selling their good or service – you’re not allowed to do that. But the most successful businesses create effective monopolies in their markets, by doing things and going places that make it very difficult for the competition to follow.
Lemnos Labs, Eclipse, Silicon Valley Bank, and Cooley recently hosted an event called Second Wave Hardware in San Francisco. Asking CEOs and founders to leave their teams and customers for a day is a significant request. We wanted to honor that request with an event focused on deep connections and content. Less being talked at and more networking amongst hardware peers.
I am excited to share some great news! I am joining the team at Lemnos Labs as Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR).
As Director of Portfolio Development, Tim will be working with the companies at the New Forge to develop solid product development plans, and helping them to craft a path to a successful launch.
We are excited to announce that Tim Skowronski has joined our team as Director of Portfolio Development.
I had the opportunity to speak at ARM’s TechCon 2015, presenting a VC’s perspective on the Internet of Things (IoT). Highlights of that talk can be viewed here, but you can read my more detailed thoughts below.
One of the most frequent questions we get is “Who does Lemnos Labs invest in? Do you incubate companies? Are you an venture fund investing in bigger hardware startups?” The answer is yes. Learn more here.
When evaluating wearables startups, I’m looking for three additional skill sets to be explicitly represented in individual founders or implicitly through talents nurtured by the founding team. These skills, psychology, material science, and fashion design, are critical assets for wearable computing, and I believe they are also incredibly important for billions-scale embedded sensor networks, next-generation health, and other emerging market segments.
This November I had the opportunity to articipate in a panel at the M1 Summit in San Francisco. The topic, where IoT is headed in 2015, was interesting for me because IoT is such a broad and overloaded phrase that I was keenly interested to see how the smart folks on the panel would define it and what trends would emerge from that vector. Watch here.
I recently conducted an interview with the great folks at Swarmbuild. We covered how I got into hardware many years ago and some of my thoughts on what has changed that is fueling the hardware renaissance. We also frankly discuss the challenges still facing this nascent renaissance, including things Boris and the team at Swarmbuild are hoping to improve!
Alex Yancher, one of the Pantry founders, has a post on Food+Tech Connect about innovation in the food space. It’s a great read and further evidence that the hardware renaissance extends past PCBs and devices to impact huge markets like food preparation and delivery.
We’re so proud that in the past month two Lemnos Labs companies announced significant funding events. More interestingly, both came from our ever-growing aerospace portfolio. The first funding announcement was from Airware. They raised a $25 million Series B from Kleiner Perkins. The second funding announcement was Spire, formerly Nanosatisfi, who raised a $25 million Series A led by RRE. Read more.
In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 8 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Adam Ellsworth, founder of 8-Bit Lit, creators of the Question Block Lamp.
In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 7 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Dave Merrill, co-founder of Sifteo and Elroy Air, and Venture Partner at Lemnos.
In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 6 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with interviewing John Stanfield, the co-founder and CEO of Local Motion, which was acquired by Zipcar.
This is a guest post from Shireen Yates, CEO of 6SensorLabs, about her first six months with Lemnos.
In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 5 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Cheryl Kellond, founder and CEO of Bia, a former Lemnos portfolio company.
One of the most over-used phrases I hear is “hardware is hard”. Never a truer statement said, but I believe many who say it don’t really understand why. To most it is seemingly obvious because hardware involves physical parts? Sure, but I think a slightly more concrete but compact reason lies in first ten hires at a software startup versus a hardware startup. Learn more.
This is a guest post from Ilya Polyakov, co-founder of Revolve Robotics, makers of Kubi. Ilya explores why local manufacturing makes sense.
In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 4 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Art Tkachenko, co-Founder of Pantry, a former Lemnos portfolio company that created fresh food vending machines.
In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 3 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Peter Platzer, the CEO of Spire, formerly NanoSatisfi.
Our model is to invest in a small number of companies every year (10-12) that we think we can add significant value to through our process. We explain why not having classes allows us to ensure that the companies we invest in have the time they need to hit the milestones to be successful.
In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 2 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Ilya Polyakov, co-founder and CTO of Revolve Robotics, a former portfolio company of Lemnos.
In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 1 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Chris Bruce, the CEO of Sproutling, which was acquired by Mattel.
We’re often asked why we don’t host traditional demo days. There are many reasons, partly driven by the fact our accelerator model doesn’t involve classes, but we feel strongly about getting our companies funded by the highest caliber investors rather than creating artificial demand to promote quick decision-making and the highest valuation. Learn more.
Every story at Lemnos starts with an application. It seems like only yesterday that we screened Sproutling’s application. My first reaction was “amazing market opportunity, but that product will be hard to build well.” Their founding team fit one of the archetypes we appreciate most. Learn why here.
What is the biggest challenge startups face? Some say that delivering products at the intersection of compelling, intuitive, and quality is the biggest challenge. First time founders say it is raising venture capital. Experienced entrepreneurs, however, often point to hiring, saying there is a hierarchy to these challenges. We look at the issues and offer tips for founders.
The new frontier is now gesture control. Learn more about this development and why we are excited about one company in particular: Leap Motion.
After the wild ride that was 2012, learn what can you expect from Lemnos Labs in 2013.
Lemnos Labs’ Hardware 2.0 Conference is featured in Wired. Read the full article.
We want to be the first investor in your hardware startup. Hardware startups require capital and hands-on expertise, so we blend the best elements of a seed stage firm and incubator….