Pebble, a Palo Alto, CA-based developer of a smart watch that connects to smartphones, received $15m in Series A funding from Charles River Ventures.
The company intends to use the capital to grow the software engineering team (read here), expand its open development platform and scale operations.
Founded by Eric Migicovsky, Pebble, which already raised over $10M launch from over 68,000 backers on Kickstarter (read here), has developed a customizable device, which enables users to download watchapps ranging from creative watchfaces to activity tracker apps.
The company released the first stage of its open software development kit (SDK) in April 2013 by enabling third party developers to create watchfaces and games for Pebble. They join supported sites like mypebblefaces.com, forums.getpebble.com and watchface-generator.de.
According to a written statement, over 8,000 developers have downloaded the Pebble SDK, resulting in more than 5,000 unique watchapps and 300,000 watchapp installs in just over a month.
Today, the company released:
– the “PebbleKit”, which enables two-way communication between Pebble and the smartphone at developer.getpebble.com and third parties to develop watchapps that send and receive information from a connected smartphone;
– the Pebble Sports API with RunKeeper, a GPS fitness-tracking app, and FreeCaddie, a GPS golf rangefinder.
FinSMEs
16/05/2013