Founded
2013
Crowdfunding
How they do it: Pebble is a smartwatch developed by Pebble Technology Corporation. Funding was conducted through a Kickstarter campaign running from April 2012, through May 2012, which raised $10.3 million; at the time, it was the most funded project in Kickstarter history. Pebble began shipping watches to Kickstarter backers in January 2013.
Open Source
How they do it: Pebble released an SDK for developers to publish their own apps on the Pebble Watch, called PebbleKit. After being acquired by fitbit in 2015, parts of the source code for Pebble’s firmware was published to GitHub. This sparked a community of developers aiming to create an open source alternative to the discontinued PebbleOS, called Rebble.
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