Hardware Platform Simultaneously Announces Partnerships with GE, Arrow Electronics and Freescale.
In an email to supporters Dragon Innovation announced their platform had gone live along with several new hardware projects on its site. Dragon shared their pending site launch just last month as they revealed investments from several large venture capital groups in the amount of $2.3 Million. Dragon has previously aided crowdfunding superstar Pebble Watch ramp up in shipping their devices.
The new Boston based crowdfunding site also revealed they have partnered with General Electric’s Idea Works Team to give hardware entrepreneurs unique access to senior staff within GE, R&D collaboration (including Global Research Centers), technology transfer, licensing opportunities and help with go-to-market activities. Dragon Innovation is also collaborating with Arrow Electronics and Freescale to help entrepreneurs introduce innovative products, reduce time to market, and enhance overall competiveness.
“The advanced manufacturing revolution depends on everyday inventors and maker communities who are bringing new ideas forward at a record pace,” said Beth Comstock, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, GE. “At GE we are passionate about speeding up innovation in this area and are excited to partner with Dragon Innovation to offer our expertise and resources and help hardware entrepreneurs scale their new products and ideas.”
Dragon Innovation provides entrepreneurs with the tools for planning, funding, making and selling hardware products. With years of experience in hardware manufacturing, Dragon Innovation’s team can accurately estimate costs and timelines, and work with entrepreneurs to set goals and ship dates. By working with Dragon Innovation, entrepreneurs have confidence that their hardware projects will ship on time and at the scale demanded by crowdfunding.
“Dragon Innovation helped us take our crowdfunding success and translate it into shipping more than 100,000 Pebbles in just over a year,” said Eric Migicovsky, founder and CEO, Pebble Technology. “We’re excited to see Dragon expand on its foundation of helping makers succeed by integrating a hardware focused crowdfunding platform. To show our support, we are providing a limited number of Pebble watches for the launch.”
The first wave of projects seeking funding via the Dragon Innovation crowdfunding platform includes:
- Dash Robotics – Dash, an educational robot for the budding engineer, hobbyist, or child looking to explore programmable robots
- Hammerhead – Hammerhead Navigation, the first social navigation tool for bikes
- Infinite Corridor Technology – A flexible, twistable, bendable circuit board, LIMBERboard is an Atmel based, microcontroller board embracing open source design for wearable technology
- Onehundred – Ollie, a perfectly flat, metal multi-purpose tool for quick fixes and projects
- Rest Devices – Mimo, a wearable sensor for infants to help parents monitor a baby’s health and activity
- Technical.io – Tessel, an internet-connected microcontroller that is progammable in JavaScript and allows developers to extend the reach of the web to physical objects
- Weartrons – The Run-n-Read enables reading with ease while on a treadmill, or riding in a moving vehicle
“Hardware entrepreneurs run the risk of running out of money, even with a perceived successful crowdfunding campaign, if they haven’t properly calculated the costs behind delivering their project. We can help entrepreneurs avoid these pitfalls because of our deep experience in building hardware” said Scott N. Miller, founder and CEO, of Dragon Innovation. “By partnering with GE, we can help hardware entrepreneurs connect with the incredible GE ecosystem with access to GE’s vast product resources and knowhow. Furthermore, Arrow and Freescale’s design and manufacturing services and expertise across the product lifecycle will prove to be invaluable for getting products to market.”