Crowdfunding as a stepping stone to Venture Funding? Yes, Please. Oculus Rift, Thalmic Labs, and Lima all have that in common, as the later has just secured a $2.5M Series A from Partech ventures, after raising a wopping $1.2 Million on Kickstarter last year.
Co-founded by Severin Marcombes & Gawen Arab, the announcement that the product will ship Q3 of this year may also relieve backers of the project, which wrapped up last September – the 1 year delay period has been largely due to the industrialization process, as well, apparently, to the fundraising process.
Lima’s goal was to provide infinite storage across all devices – the startup previously worked on a software solution solving the same problem, and launched the Kickstarter campaign when they realized that, by tapping into a local storage solution and an ethernet connection, they could sync information from said local storage device to smartphones, laptops and more.
Lima CEO Severin Marcombes will be speaking at the Connected Conference June 18th-19th in Paris, on a panel which will explore the role of crowdfunding and VC for connected hardware. Clearly this announcement signals that the two go hand-in-hand. Crowdfunding validated the market interest (something which software does much more easily by looking at virality, retention, and other digital KPIs) as well as price point, and venture capital allows them to build out an engineering and sales team.
Will Lima be the next Oculus Rift or Thalmic Labs? Only time will tell, but they now have the means to go from ‘campaign’ to ‘company’.
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