Crowd-funding changing the game for chip firms

LimeSDR

Lime Microsystems has started a crowd-funding campaign to bring their LimeSDR software defined radio platform into full-scale production.

The company is hoping to raise $500,000 to fund the final stages of development and mass production of the LimeSDR.

Crowd-funding is changing the way companies commercialise their product developments. It gives them the possibility to bring a new product to market quicker than if they had to plan the investment from internal resources.

They can explore new areas and be more opportunistic in their product plans.

Last year, Imagination Technologies used a Kickstarter campaign raise £30,000 to bring its Creator Ci40 IoT development board to the embedded computing market being defined by Raspberry Pi and Arduino.

It also gives companies the opportunity to modify and expand their product launch plans as a result of customer response they get in the crowd-funding campaign.

It used additional product incentives to increase the funding to £35,000. “If we are able to achieve our second Stretch Goal (£35,000) by the end of the campaign, we will add a free case with every Ci40 board or kit purchased from Kickstarter,” said Imagination.

The company wrote on Kickstarter at the end of the campaign:

“We have now achieved £30,000 which is the first of our Stretch Goals. We will now develop and add three extra project examples on our GitHub page in addition to the two that we are currently working on. These projects will extend the functionality of the Creator Ci40 dev kit to cover cloud-based transactions and advanced IoT functions. We will update you with progress on these projects as they happen.”