51–60 of 219 posts
Fools and their money are easily parted, even easier if you slap "Ai", "Enterprise" and "Cloud" in the pitch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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.
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 find it very ironic (in a funny way) how the comments for funding rounds always have a sense of disappointment on Hacker News. We are all reluctantly expecting the worst when private equity and venture capital get involved despite being under the roof of a VC, in essence. I am surprised like another commenter that Arduino has to raise money, on the other hand. I wish it was a bit clearer on how this money ties into…
What kind of market does Arduino expect to get into with that money? I can't see any.
I find it very ironic (in a funny way) how the comments for funding rounds always have a sense of disappointment on Hacker News. We are all reluctantly expecting the worst when private equity and venture capital get involved despite being under the roof of a VC, in essence. I am surprised like another commenter that Arduino has to raise money, on the other hand. I wish it was a bit clearer on how this money ties into…
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.
Arduino has always come across to me as being for hobbyist/beginner/learning, and critical infra would use things more like, for example, STMicro or Texas Instruments microcontrollers
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...
I honestly don't see how such strategies work long-term though. As a former embedded SW engineer, the Arduino IDE seems very toy-like - which is excellent for people just starting out, but not something a company developing an embedded product is likely to use. I think PlatformIO is similar but I have only tried that once.
If these companies try to get vendors to pay them to support their boards, or try to start charging users directly, I really think that the hobby community will move on and someone will fork or create their own solution, and the whole cycle will start again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> sold equity in the company. > diminishing the payout the founders would get if the company pays dividends or is sold That’s VC debt
Disclosure: is founder who has raised money through both equity financing and debt financing.