STONED: The rise and fall of Pebble

Once the darling of the smartwatch industry and the Kickstarter community, the story of Pebble is a stark reminder that, in tech, things can fall apart very quickly.

The idea of a smartwatch has been tossed around for a long time, but it was only in 2012 that things started kicking off thanks to a little company called Pebble. On 11 April 2012, Pebble launched a Kickstarter campaign for its Pebble Smartwatch. The Pebble Smartwatch has a 1.26inch e-paper display and could show noti cations from your Android or iOS device. The campaign had a modest target of US$100,000, but thanks to the interest around smartwatches at the time, it met its goal in just two hours. When the campaign ended on 18 May, Pebble made history by raising US$10.2 million on the back of 68,929 pledges.

In early 2015, Pebble turned to Kickstarter again to launch its second-generation smartwatch, the Pebble Time. It was an even greater success, raising US$20.3 million from 78.471 backers. Even today, the Pebble Time still remains to be the most funded project on Kickstarter.

By 2016, it was apparent that trouble was brewing at Pebble when it turned to Kickstarter again for the Pebble 2, Time 2, and Core - the company’s third-generation series of devices. At this point, many were wondering why Pebble, which enjoyed so much success on Kickstarter previously, had to keep returning to the platform to raise funds.

We now know that Pebble was in fact mired in debt. The Pebble Time failed to meet sales goals and the company ended 2015 in the red. Failure to raise funds from investors led it to lay off a quarter of its stuff in March 2016. By then, it was forced to turn to Kickstarter again to raise the necessary monies needed to produce the Pebble 2 in the hopes of staying afloat. But it was too little too late. Later that year, Pebble led for bankruptcy and sold its intellectual property to rivals Fitbit; the Pebble Time 2 and Pebble Core were ultimately canceled.