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Arduino raises $22M Series B round

blog.arduino.cc

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Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#21

Post by coldpie »

sgt wrote: post #16
candiddevmike wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you have a 100M business selling cheap, niche microcontrollers to hobbyists? They're starting to pursue a subscription model (Arduino Cloud), I'd expect them to shutter products that won't work with the subscription model and require everything else to use it. It's your standard enshitification play.

By having 10M+ hobbyists that you support and inspire. That's how... easier said than done, but if they play their cards right, it is possible.

> 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.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#22

Post by FirmwareBurner »

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…

>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?id=9224

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#23

Post by wiremine »

I'm torn on this.

I'm the CTO for a small software firm that does a lot if IoT. We've seen a number of startups build their prototypes using Arduino. Historically, there was no clear path to production. So, I think they're listening to some of their customers, and it is a clear opportunity for them.

On the other hand, positioning yourself as a hobbyist platform, _and_ a "production-grade" platform is tricky. I really like their entry-level boards for hobby-level things. I hope that continues.

Finally, a few thoughts:

1. If you dig into their code, their embedded software has struggled: the architecture is all over the place, the implementation is suspect in some areas, and testing has been weak. Hopefully they back port the new (hopefully improved) code to the hobby hardware.

1. As long as they don't require their cloud, I wish them well in that area. It's a really tough market.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#24

Post by tedivm »

coldpie wrote: post #21
sgt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By having 10M+ hobbyists that you support and inspire. That's how... easier said than done, but if they play their cards right, it is possible.

> 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 path to extreme growth and profits. You also can't discharge ownership in bankruptcy like you can with debt.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#25

Post by dimal »

Cue up the announcement two years from now about the "exciting" news about joining X megacorp, where nothing will change for users, except things will be better for some reason. Then cue the announcement two years after that where everything does indeed change for users for the worse. Then cue the inevitable open source fork...

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#27

Post by bityard »

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...

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#28

Post by trollied »

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 their growth aims are realistic.

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#29

Post by yard2010 »

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

Re: Arduino raises $22M Series B round

#30

Post by FredPret »

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

> super low cost ESPs from China

Just checked aliexpress.com. You were not kidding - $1-2 per item!

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