HAXLR8R is a venture fund which focuses on entrepreneurs building hardware devices. It offers seed funding ($25,000), office space as well as mentorship along with the other opportunies for 2-4 person startups to take an idea to a product.
HAXLR8R selects startups to work with twice a year and has a dual location (San Francisco and Shenzhen). Its first batch ran from March to June 2012 and has been widely received as the start of a new hardware revolution.
The Genesis
While it seems this ‘makes much more sense’ these days, the idea came up a little while ago…
Founded by Cyril Ebersweiler, Sean O’Sullivan and Eric Pan, the roots of the program started way back when China.axlr8r was born in 2009. For a reason we still ignore as of today, the summer program for startups based in China incubated not one, but two startups working on hardware startups (including two foreign entrepreneurs coming from abroad).
With a backpack full of lessons learned, Cyril had the chance to meet with the founders of LEAP (David and Michael) and subsequently invested in the company. The experience coming out of this relationship was a final training ground for HAXLR8R, and a final proof of concept at Techcrunch Disrupt with Nextgoals (part of China.axlr8r batch II) convinced us there was a problem to be solved, for entrepreneurs and the sake of innovation.
If you are curious about China.axlr check things out on their website.
HAXLR8R is brought to you by Cyril Ebersweiler and Zach Smith.
Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
