The Top 50 most funded IoT campaigns on kickstarter and indiegogo

Recently I’ve noticed a growing number of IoT startups raising a lot of money very quickly on kickstarter and indiegogo. Skully Helmets raised more than $1M in a day and still growing,  Sense raised more than $2M, and JIBO just surpassed $1.8M, just to name a few (all figures at the time of writing this post).

I’ve been keeping track of these campaigns, and decided to make and share the Top 50 list of the most funded IoT campaigns on kickstarter and indiegogo.  I didn’t include pure robotics/drones and 3D printing companies as I think they are different enough to belong in a different bucket. I did my best checking the numbers but if you catch any errors, please let me know and I’ll fix them.

 Top 50 most funded IoT campaigns on kickstarter and indiegogo（as of Aug 22, 2014, all amounts converted to US$）

*Jibo and Skully’s campaigns are still ongoing as of Aug 25, 2014

 Okay, so let’s take this a step further and see how the campaigns faired out over time. Below is a scatter graph that graphically displays when the campaigns ended and how much they raised.

 A few things that stand out are:

1) The early anomalies were really something special

Pebble and OUYA raised a LOT of money.  None of the later IoT companies didn’t even come close to it. They were the anomalies. I’ll bet they inspired a lot of entrepreneurs to follow in their footsteps.

2) The IoT baby boom began around May 2013

You can see the cluster getting very busy right after May 2013. This is about a year after Pebble and OUYA shook the world, so this may be the first batch of entrepreneurs that got inspired by them. Timing sounds right as our friend at emberlight took about a year from conceptualization to kickstarter.

3) New stars coming out from the new-generation

After the first batch, we start to see an upward scatter with new stars like The Dash, Scio, Sense, JIBO, Anova, Canary, Scanadu, etc. appearing after spring/summer 2014. What’s different from the Pebble days is that there are more of them and more variety of them, but raising more humble figures  (ONLY a couple of million or so dollars!).

So why does the boom continue? Are the products/ideas getting better? Are the entrepreneurs getting better at deploying campaigns? Are there more backers? Perhaps a combination of the above and more. But all in all, I don’t see signs of things slowing down yet and there still seems to be lots of room to test and try your craziest IoT ideas on crowd funding sites!

Check out the full scan of the IoT sector with more than 500 companies here.

Best, Masami Kato