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Arduino raises $22M Series B round

blog.arduino.cc

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Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#191

Post by crote »

mbanzi wrote: post #131
crote wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to forget that some businesses exist before VC funding. Arduino started out as an open-source project, with further development funded by the sale of physical hardware. They did not need tens of millions of VC funding for that, and they independently developed the "cool stuff" people here care about. Unlike most startups seen here, they were not selling stuff at a loss in the hope of conquering the world and…

users, especially beginners, like consistency. So you call that "stagnation" I call that "avoid adding stuff that people don't really need". We make more than 100 different products so we haven't stagnated at all.

And yet that "stuff people don't really need" is selling like hot cakes at your competitors, only for a worse variant to eventually show up at Arduino - although it probably won't even be carried by your own distributors. Sparkfun and Adafruit are reinventing the hobbyist ecosystem with STEMMA/Qwiic. Meanwhile Arduino was (despite the failed kickstarter) earlier to market with the competing ESLOV connector - which seven years later isn't even found on your own bread&butter controller boards.

Look, I had fun with Arduino back in the days, but in 2023 you folks simply don't have an attractive product range anymore. When I open Adafruit's website I am almost guaranteed to immediately be greeted by a handful of brand new products which immediately look interesting to me. When I open the Arduino website I have to do a lot of effort to even find a product lineup, and even when I manage to finally get there it isn't at all obvious what I should buy and why.

I own several Arduino products, and I genuinely forgot you existed. For your sake I sincerely hope I just live in a massive filter bubble and am massively mistaken about the hobbyist market.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#192

Post by daaaaaaan »

snarfy wrote: post #49
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…

And it's not even their IDE. They just slapped some AVR compilers into Processing https://processing.org/

and even though it has the capability, they keep refusing to allow a vim mode option.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#193

Post by twosdai »

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…

Hey thanks for commenting here. I think many people in hn don't realize that Foss projects maintained and managed by a company are used to further a commercial goal otherwise ardunio would go under and then it doesn't matter the state of the Foss stuff. If in the future for whatever reason the sentiment for the Foss portion changes the community can always fork it, or continue development. That's the beauty of open source software.

I'm also biased since I'm building a vc backed product as well.

Super stoked to see how your professional and enterprise offerings turn out. Do you have a public roadmap anywhere?

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#194

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #167
jandrese wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap boards aren't new, but cheap boards that have a sane development environment and decent documentation are far more novel.

Many of the Arduino libraries have been modified to work with most of the cheap boards (already listed by another user). If the Arduino IDE becomes a pain point I'm sure an open IDE (or VS Code plugin?) will step in. (There may already be such a thing?) Edit: another comment suggests PlatformIO + VS Code allows you to avoid the Arduino IDE.

> another comment suggests PlatformIO + VS Code allows you to avoid the Arduino IDE.

s/allows you to avoid/is highly preferable to/ :-)

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#195

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

Dork1234 wrote: post #95
dave78 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was recently a flareup on HN about PlatformIO trying to make money by charging a fee to vendors to be supported ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36090536 ). Maybe Arduino wants in on that. 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 develo…

What is the difference between PlatformIO and something you use to develop for an Embedded platform? To me it seems PlatformIO is just a wrapper around the same command-line tools used by other companies.

> just a wrapper

That phrase encompasses a huge amount of value. VS Code+PlatformIO is free but I would happily pay for it. I was already paying for an Arduino Visual Studio plugin (Visual Micros) before I learned about it.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#196

Post by squeaky-clean »

chrstphrknwtn wrote: post #187
squeaky-clean wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a license page for this https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L... Not-legally-binding tl;dr The "duino" suffix could be a trademark issue. If you rename it and you keep your hardware designs open source you're fine. Otherwise contact them for a proprietary use license.

Hmmm that's a bummer, maybe I'll just fork it, call it something else and then claim I created it in a weekend.

CC-BY-SA-4.0, so you also can't claim original creation of it, you have to maintain an attribution to the original creator and you cannot change the license.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#197

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

usrusr wrote: post #160
londons_explore wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In professional environments no one uses the Arduino IDE I disagree. In companies with an embedded software team, no. But in companies where software isn't a focus of what the company does, there are plenty of bits of arduino code shipped on millions of devices. For example, my Beko branded fridge (they sell 3 million fridges per year). And my unbranded motion-sensitive security light.

And this is where the brand comes in: "let's try to do it in-house this time, instead of hiring those embedded-mercenaries again. Arduino was originally designed for people even more clueless than us" Arduino had more impact at making people aware that tinkering with controllers might be fun (or profitable) than the actual amount of tinkering with Arduinos (or clones) suggests. Aiming for that "not the core job descr…

Not only that, but the popularity of the ecosystem opens up the feasibility of projects that would otherwise not be considered.

As a professional embedded systems engineer, I'm not the "ideal Arduino customer." But having the arduino ecosystem available means that I can build a one-off for a client in a matter of minutes when it would otherwise take days or weeks. That means I become the "embedded mercenary" that they like and want to hire again :-)

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#198

Post by yilugurlu »

Wow, I came to see the comments and saw mbanzi answering, and ohh, boy, everyone is hammering him. He genuinely tries to address concerns and questions, but there are many comments with plain intentions to create a flame. Good job on keeping a cool head and explaining the same thing repeatedly.

Congratulations also. Getting here and raising a significant amount of money is never easy.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#199

Post by lionkor »

LandoCalrissian wrote: post #147

"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" That entire sentence makes me want to jump off a bridge.

I think the only missing keyword of failing/irrelevant businesses is "subscription"

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#200

Post by lionkor »

zemo wrote: post #134

> Another consistent part is earmarked to help Arduino grow even more in the US, where we recently opened an office in Austin, TX and bolstered our presence in Chicago, IL. Oh! I want to hear more about what they’re doing in Chicago since I’m in Chicago.

Maybe their AI Cloud for Business product
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