Exploride drove out of India to global crowdfunding site Indiegogo last week with bated breath. The crossed fingers turned to high-fives within an hour as the creators of this transparent heads-up display (HUD) for cars watched the Indiegogo counter ratchet up to US$20,000. Half way through the fifth day, Exploride raced past its US$100,000 target. Gleeful Sunil Vallath, founder, tells me that a new surge target will be set tomorrow. Probably US$500,000.
We wrote about Exploride a few days before it hit the crowdfunding circuit. It’s unusual to see a smart hardware device meant for the global automobile market come out of a small town in the south Indian state of Kerala. Exploride HUD lets you access music and maps, take or decline calls, read texts, and get alerts on a melt-into-the-windshield-like piece of glass fixed on top of the dashboard. You can control it all with gestures and voice.
The Exploride team was quietly confident of its prospects on Indiegogo.
“Our expectation was high due to the massive response and sign-ups we got on our website. In the beginning of the crowdfunding campaign, 50 percent of the backing came from those who signed up on the Exploride site. So right away, we knew that we were going to hit the goal within 10 days. But our backers proved us wrong and got us there in half the time,” Vallath says.
Before Exploride two other hardware startups, also from Kerala, had successful campaigns. Mindhelix raised US$120,000 on Kickstarter for Rico, a smarthome security device made from discarded smartphones. Fin, a wearable ring that turns your palm into a numeric keypad and gesture interface, raisedUS$202,547 on Indiegogo. But the speed at which Exploride raced to its target sets a new high. It’s bound to inspire the many innovators hacking away on their smart gadgets in little corners of India.
And who knows, they might get the attention of global VCs too. Institutional VCs may be reluctant to put seed money into hardware startups, but they’re happy to back the ones that get going on crowdfunded platforms. One out of every 10 hardware startups that raised US$100,000 or more on Kickstarter and Indiegogo went on to get funding from VCs.