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Arduino raises $22M Series B round

blog.arduino.cc

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Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#31

Post by yard2010 »

tedivm wrote: post #24
coldpie wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if they play their cards right, it is possible. Not with $54M in debt to service. This is a death warrant. I'm sure the execs will make out nicely, though.

There isn't any debt to service. Taking funding isn't the same as taking debt (in some ways its worse, in some better), and there's no direct interest or payment they have to make every month like if it was debt. The problem is that they give up ownership (and probably ownership) to people who may have different goals and values. This can lead to enshittification, especially for a company that doesn't have a good pat…

Isn't "raising funds" just a euphemism for taking a loan you don't have to return in cash? Like a loan which is not regulated as a loan

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#32

Post by jes5199 »

trollied wrote: post #28

Given it all started in 2005, I'm very surprised to see they're raising capital. I guess I incorrectly assumed they would have been very profitable by now with such a large user base & number of units shipped. 18 years is a long time. The market has moved on significantly from when they first started (Raspberry Pi having launched things like the Pico etc), and there is a large amount of competition, so I do wonder if…

Raspberry Pi has found enough use in industry that it’s gotten hard for hobbyists to find boards. Maybe someone convinced Arduino that there are commercial applications

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#33

Post by ClumsyPilot »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #22
rollcat wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, the Arduino IDE was precisely the game changer that made a lot of people get into embedded systems, and not the board based on an Atmega MCU that anyone else could make. Interesting. Personally I find the $OFFICIAL_IDE repulsive, and strongly prefer just writing the code in $MY_IDE, with a Makefile on the side. OTOH I find the "branded" hardware attractive: it's a known quality in an ecosystem that I sometime…

>Personally I find the $OFFICIAL_IDE repulsive, and strongly prefer just writing the code in $MY_IDE, with a Makefile on the side. If you know what a Makefile is, then you're not Arduino's target market, but there are millions of people out there who want to turn a relay ON when some sensor gets too hot for some garage project, without first learning about Makefiles or registers. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item…

> If you know what a Makefile is, then you're not Arduino's target market

I am arduino targey market and I know makefiles, I hate them with a passion. One must know his enemies better than he knows himself

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#34

Post by dbrgn »

londons_explore wrote: post #7

Oh :-( Every time a cool little company gets VC funding, you know that the free and opensource projects will dry up, and before long they'll be making premium high end products and suing anyone who tries to compete.

To quote from the article:

> After the first $32 million Series B financing received in 2022, “This investment will allow us to further fuel our transformational platform initiative for professional customers, lowering the barriers to entry in IoT and AI by providing a continuum from hardware to Cloud,” says Arduino’s CEO Fabio Violante.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#35

Post by nylonstrung »

coldpie wrote: post #12
lexicality wrote: post #3

Sounds to me like another nail in the coffin for Arduino as a useful tool for hobbyists. That said I stopped buying Arduinos years ago and started buying super low cost ESPs from China and I think most other people did too so I guess it's not going to be a huge blow

Yeahhhhh. Taking on VC debt is a great way to kill your company. Guess this will buy them a few more years before they start turning the screws.

They didn't take debt— they sold equity in the company.

In reality this makes the company MORE financially healthy, while diminishing the payout the founders would get if the company pays dividends or is sold

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#36

Post by _spduchamp »

lexicality wrote: post #3

Sounds to me like another nail in the coffin for Arduino as a useful tool for hobbyists. That said I stopped buying Arduinos years ago and started buying super low cost ESPs from China and I think most other people did too so I guess it's not going to be a huge blow

Yup. I switched to ESPs for projects and won't go back to Arduino. I had to fix someone else's Arduino based art installation a couple weeks ago and it seemed weird and very retro going back to work with that Arduino form factor.

That said, maybe they have a future being a standard component in industrial settings. I would tend to trust an Arduino more than an ESP in critical infrastructure.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#37

Post by uxp8u61q »

bityard wrote: post #27
tyingq wrote: post #2

Makes me curious what their revenue trends look like. From the outside, it feels like many people in the space are using the Arduino IDE, but with MCUs they bought from some other vendor.

Many makers I know of are using PlatformIO these days: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=platform...

Which uses Arduino under the hood.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#38

Post by ycombinete »

lexicality wrote: post #3

Sounds to me like another nail in the coffin for Arduino as a useful tool for hobbyists. That said I stopped buying Arduinos years ago and started buying super low cost ESPs from China and I think most other people did too so I guess it's not going to be a huge blow

I guess the first nail was hobbyists buying their boards from China.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#39

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

londons_explore wrote: post #13
londons_explore wrote: post #7

Oh :-( Every time a cool little company gets VC funding, you know that the free and opensource projects will dry up, and before long they'll be making premium high end products and suing anyone who tries to compete.

I predict they'll go after microcontroller manufacturers first. "Do you want your dev boards supported by the Arduino Ecosystem? Pay us 10% of revenue, and then we'll talk."

I don't doubt that they'll try, but I don't think they have the market position to pull that off anymore, not with ESP32 et al. ascendant. Or maybe I'm just out of touch with that side of the market, hard to tell.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#40

Post by jes5199 »

rollcat wrote: post #18
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, way back then, the Arduino IDE was precisely the game changer that made a lot of hobbyists and average people get into embedded systems without much friction or EE background, and not the board based on an Atmega MCU that anyone else could make. Many eons ago before the Arduino came out, I used to have EE labs in university based on the same Atmega chip but using a commercial IDE-compiler, and boy was that a gi…

> Well, the Arduino IDE was precisely the game changer that made a lot of people get into embedded systems, and not the board based on an Atmega MCU that anyone else could make. Interesting. Personally I find the $OFFICIAL_IDE repulsive, and strongly prefer just writing the code in $MY_IDE, with a Makefile on the side. OTOH I find the "branded" hardware attractive: it's a known quality in an ecosystem that I sometime…

honestly I want to be like you but I never figured out the toolchain to flash an ESP8266 over USB without the Arduino environment
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