Pebble Time Raises Over $5.5 Million in 6 Hours. Nears $10 Million on Day Two.

Pebble Time Liftoff

Pebble Time, the new iteration of the Pebble Smartwatch, launched a promotional crowdfunding campaign yesterday on Kickstarter.  The first time around it took a few weeks to raise over $10 million.  This time it may take just 2 as already over 42,000 have blitzed the pages of Kickstarter to purchase a smartwatch.

Pebble has launched what is certain to be a record setting crowdfunding campaign.  Kickstarter recognized this fact in a quick post highlighting a few time stamps from yesterday:

At 9:44 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, Pebble Time launched on Kickstarter.

At 10:00 a.m. news of the launch broke. Medium publishedthis in-depth, behind-the-scenes piece.

At 10:17 a.m. the project was successfully funded, hitting its goal of $500,000 in about 32 minutes.

At 10:32 a.m. the project’s funding total hit $1 million dollars, making it the fastest project ever to hit that milestone.

By 10:33 a.m. Pebble’s founder Eric Migicovsky wasunapologetically tweeting about momentarily breaking Kickstarter. (Thanks a lot Eric.)

By 10:51 a.m. both Pebble Time and Kickstarter were trending on Twitter.

By 1:52 p.m. 600 comments had been left by backers on the project page. One of our favorites was this amazing time-lapse.

At 2:26 p.m. Pebble Time exceeded $5 million. The previous fastest to $5 million? Coolest Cooler, which took over a week (7 days 6 hours) to hit that mark.

It’s now 3:44 p.m. EST and Pebble Time has been live for exactly six hours. They’ve raised over $5.5 million and gathered a community of over 27,000 early adopters.

Eric MigicovskyEven Eric Migicovsky and team seemed shocked to the response.  In a backers update Eric stated, “Seven hours in and all of us here at Pebble HQ are absolutely stunned by the enthusiasm you’ve had for Pebble Time. We had hoped you’d like what we’ve been working on…but you never know for sure until you launch!  The good news is that you’ve made it crystal clear. And we thank you immensely for this”.

Pebble Time was released as a bit of a counter-offensive to the forthcoming Apple Watch which is due to be released in April. Interestedly enough, some pundits are using the success of Pebble Time as validation for the next Apple tech device drawing a parallel to demand for Pebble.

If you are interested in learning more Pebble has scheduled an AMA on Reddit for today at 12 Noon PST.

Kickstarter says it can’t wait to see what Pebble does in the next 20 days. We would agree with that statement.


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