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Welcome to the inaugural edition of our quarterly newsletter where you'll learn about informal clients launching innovative new businesses and the informal members helping build them. You'll also find links to great events and news from across the hardware community. Let us know what you think of it!

For our first issue, we're highlighting one of our first and longest running clients, Aloe Care Health.

Aloe Care Health is part of a growing number of hardware healthcare companies doing incredible work, especially over the last year, when wellness checks and the health and safety of vulnerable populations has been top of everybody’s mind. If you have a loved one who needs check ins, Aloe Care's emergency response system is voice-activated with access to trained professionals 24/7.

We have been working with Aloe Care since May 2019 when they brought on an informal team to redesign their mechanical components after launching a successful beta prototype. Since then, we helped Aloe Care manufacture thousands of units in under 10 month for less than the salary of a single full time engineer.

We wrote a blog post comparing hiring full-time staff to hiring freelancers based on Aloe Care's experience. Check it out on Medium.

Our featured freelancer this issue is also our co-founder, Sam Holland. Sam was the first informal member hired by Aloe Care to bring their production ready product to life. It was Sam who assembled Aloe Care's freelance hardware product team and brought them to market.

Sam is a product design engineer, meaning he's a mechanical engineer with a particular knack for consumer product design and development. He also has an encyclopedic knowledge of different materials and manufacturing methods, which he puts to good use for informal clients like Makerbot Industries, Neurosity, and Lodge. When not designing great products, Sam enjoys giving back by mentoring students and junior engineers interested in a career in hardware and manufacturing.

Hire Sam and others like him

Community gatherings & events

On November 18th Tyler Mincey will join us for the first of our public events series, Informal Talks at 5p PT // 8p ET, RSVP here.

Tyler Mincey is a partner at Bolt, an early stage VC fund investing at the intersection of the physical and digital world, and the founder + head librarian at the Teardown Library. The Teardown Library is a community of product designers, engineers, and technologists who want to learn from their peers in a hands-on way by maintaining an archive of disassembled products IRL and online.

We run a series of Hardware Meetups in multiple cities and regions of the US. Our next virtual New York Hardware Meetup is on November 16th and our next virtual LA Hardware Meetup is the following day on November 17th. We are also planning meetups in San Diego. CA and Burlington, VT.

The NYC Robotics Meetup is having their first in-person event at 6pm EST tonight at Newlab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Representatives from Honeybee Robotics, Duro UAS, and Orangewood Labs will give talks followed by networking and community announcements and demos.

Speaking of meetups: save the dates on December 9th if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and December 16th if you live in NYC for our bi-coastal Hardware Holiday Parties. More on those soon.

Industry trends & investments

HAX announced that they are building a new US headquarters in Newark, New Jersey. The SOSV-backed accelerator started nine years ago in Shenzhen and San Francisco with a focus on consumer wearables. Their new headquarters reflects a shift in HAX's focus from consumer products to industrial (70% of portfolio companies), healthcare (25%) and climate tech hardware.

China’s hardware startups are getting more venture capital funding because of Beijing’s effort to invest in technology and crack down on the internet sector. Venture firms pumped $5.4 billion into hardware startups such as chip producers and robotics makers.

This year investors are betting on quantum computing by investing $1.02 billion in the unproven field, which is more than previous 3 years investments combined.

Axelera, developer of an AI accelerator chip, raised a massive $12 million seed round last month, demonstrating that the race to build the hardware infrastructure for our autonomous future is well under way.

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