Arduino raises $22M Series B round • Hacker News Board

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#121

Post by mbanzi » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 3:35 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #53

dbrgn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So... The next versions of the arduino SDK will require a subscription and internet connection to work? (The company is hosted at the UK, isn't it? If it's so, add some invasive spying and selling your data to the list.)

no they won't... the money is used to develop our Professional products for enterprise customers.. the classic arduino will always be free. We've never build anything that would use licensing servers etc... BTW Arduino is headquartered in Switzerland/Italy/Sweden/USA so... no UK there

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#122

Post by gbear605 » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 3:36 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #65

bombcar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a loan because it doesn't have to be paid back. But it operates somewhat worse than a loan because the buyer now has some say in how the company is run, and they will want to see a return on their investment eventually. A loan may be better because as long as the company can service it, the lenders have no say in how the business is run, and they get no additional profit from increased income/profit of the b…

Except that if you sell or liquidate the company, you have to pay it all back before you can get any of the money. So... It's completely equivalent to a low preference loan.

Technically a VC with less than 50% control can’t do anything to you, so as long as you keep 51% and never sell or liquidate then it’s free money. In practice, they wind up pressuring you to do those things and then they get their money back.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#123

Post by mbanzi » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 3:37 PM UTC

Brusco_RF wrote: post #84

bombcar wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The words! They are buzzing!

Now if we could just somehow fit "web3" or "as a service" in that sentence

co founder of Arduino here) actually I hate web3 I think it's a pile of bullshit and it's slowly fading away... We've never been interested in that.

We do sell services but we try to avoid bullshit terms like "servitization"

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#124

Post by mbanzi » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 3:37 PM UTC

baz00 wrote: post #74

dbrgn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What a load of complete steaming bollocks.

What a fundamental contribution to the discussion :)

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#125

Post by sangnoir » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 3:38 PM UTC

mbanzi wrote: post #101

frollo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given Arduino's origin and first history this is especially depressing. Good old Adriano is now well and buried.

Hi (co founder of Arduino here) Good old Arduino is still here, we're still releasing a ton of tools for the community, we're still innovating every day. We're using most of the funds to develop our professional offering. I believe this is a natural progression for companies like us. Our investors leave free to work on whatever technology and let us open source anything we feel can contribute to the community. They n…

> we're still innovating every day. We're using most of the funds to develop our professional offering

You're not disagreeing with parent commenter and could both be correct!

> Our investors leave free to work on whatever technology and let us open source anything we feel can contribute to the community. They never interfere

At some point, they will expect, then demand returns on their investments, then your focus will mostly be on the professional offering, while the community product gets less love.

It's not a condemnation of your as an individual or your organization: this cycle has played out many times via VC or acquisition.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#126

Post by mbanzi » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 3:38 PM UTC

yard2010 wrote: post #29

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.

And enshitification! You forgot enshitification

Actually we're not going down that path at all. we are still doing the same things we were doing before. we have no plans for "enshittifying" our business model

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#127

Post by throwaway1777 » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 3:38 PM UTC

mbanzi wrote: post #101

frollo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given Arduino's origin and first history this is especially depressing. Good old Adriano is now well and buried.

Hi (co founder of Arduino here) Good old Arduino is still here, we're still releasing a ton of tools for the community, we're still innovating every day. We're using most of the funds to develop our professional offering. I believe this is a natural progression for companies like us. Our investors leave free to work on whatever technology and let us open source anything we feel can contribute to the community. They n…

You do realize this is what people always say when this happens? Nothing you said is reassuring, it’s basically “trust us guys”

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#128

Post by mikeortman » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 3:38 PM UTC

"Finally, we will use the additional funds to accelerate go-to-market initiatives and customer support in selected areas."

Anytime I see the business speak 'accelerate go-to-market initiatives', the company is at its end-game. Any time a leader has to call that out, they are admitting they need to spend a substantial sum of money to solve a problem a small group of kids in a garage can do with some Red Bull.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#129

Post by crote » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 3:38 PM UTC

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…

A big problem is that they didn't really innovate.

Companies like Adafruit, Sparkfun, and Pimoroni leapfrogged their hardware products, and eventually ended up developing their own ecosystems when it turned out that the Arduino IDE was more of a liability than a boon.

They were a no-brainer in 2005-2010, but why buy from Arduino in 2023 when you can get a newer product with more features at a lower price from their competitors?

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#130

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Sep 07, 2023, 3:39 PM UTC

flkenosad wrote: post #82

marcosdumay wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge difference between a company with a business model capable of taking over the world getting some investment, and one with a business model that is necessarily niche. What kind of market does Arduino expect to get into with that money? I can't see any.

Maybe the IoT market. Lots of demand for low-power hardware these days.

The Arduino is very expensive on the context of mass-produced circuits.

But yeah, maybe they'll use the money to get some cheaper wholesale products. Or maybe they'll expand their hardware to fully support low-scale IoT.

I'm not sure there is enough potential for low-scale IoT for that investment to pay off. But doing something cheaper can indeed work, and requires some money.

Too bad they aren't explaining what they'll do. The buzzword density of the article doesn't add any confidence that the company managers know what they are doing, but it could be a smoke screen.