I find it very ironic (in a funny way) how the comments for funding rounds always have a sense of disappointment on Hacker News. We are all reluctantly expecting the worst when private equity and venture capital get involved despite being under the roof of a VC, in essence.
I am surprised like another commenter that Arduino has to raise money, on the other hand. I wish it was a bit clearer on how this money ties into their strategy, are they planning to fund R&D, marketing, or manufacturing. What will Arduino look like in two years, and which stick are we getting enshittified?
Why not be negative? They're not being given $22m for funsies. The backers will want a 10x return, so somehow Arduino must now raise their value to $220 million (actually $540 million, since they raised $54m in total). Where's that money coming from?
I understand your concerns, I am just pointing out the general dissatisfaction raised here and the expectation of enshittification being the default.
I would also like to point out that you are extrapolating a bit too hard. The claim that backers will want a 10x return is not necessarily correct, nor are the examples of 220/540m valid from a valuation perspective.
There are PE firms which do not seek such exorbitant returns. Without having eyes on Arduino's financials, it's hard to say that the growth expectations are as noted. As for the valuation, the implied post-money (i.e. after-investment) valuation depends on for what percentage of equity the 54m was offered for (where the implied post-money valuation would be 54m divided by the percentage, e.g. 108m with 54m paid for 50% of ordinary shares). Other factors such as preferences etc. impact this too.
I wouldn't be so eager to get mad, that's all. I am still hopeful for Arduino's future and hope that they put the capital to good use (instead of '10x'ing it).
Except they did not accept funding from PE firms, they accepted it from completely typical VC funds, who state on their websites things such as the following:
“Anzu Partners is an investment firm that focuses on industrial and life science technology companies with the potential to transform their industries.”
“[CDP Venture Capital seeks to] foster the growth of the Italian market by attracting new national and international investors to the Venture Capital asset class by promoting a new culture of Venture Capital and entrepreneurship in Italy.”
In case you are unaware, these statements are VC dog whistles for not 10x but 100-1000x returns, without some probability of which the VC model does not work financially.
This is entirely untrue- this is squarely in the realm of growth investment, for which you're typically underwriting for 3-5x cash on cash returns over a 5 year old period
It is extremely unlikely that these funds see a path to returning >10x
Maybe things have changed but the VC model is usually unicorn or GTFO. Of course not every company will turn into one but every company they invest in should have the potential. If I'm a VC I invest in Arduino because of two storylines. It's either the "Coke" of microcontrollers (sticky brand) or the "Github of microcontrolers" (sticky platform via IDE) or a combination of both.
VC as an asset class encompasses a lot of different risk/reward profiles
What you're describing is more typical of a seed fund that is counting on one deal to return the portfolio
In a growth deal like this, esp with such an old company by VC terms, funds tolerate lower upside in exchange for capped downside and predictable returns, given that the chances the chances of complete failure/bankruptcy are comparatively less
They raised $22, but the valuation was probably closer to $100M (or even more if they raised $54 not $22). So for an investor to 10x their money, the exit needs to be for $1B or more.
They need more than that - they raised $22M but only for a portion of the company so presumably at a valuation of multiples of that. To get a 10x valuation it may have to become a unicorn.
There's a huge difference between a company with a business model capable of taking over the world getting some investment, and one with a business model that is necessarily niche.
What kind of market does Arduino expect to get into with that money? I can't see any.
> What kind of market does Arduino expect to get into with that money? I can't see any.
Maybe professional users like Raspberry Pi did (with the known consequences)? Getting out of that hobby/tinkerer niche with lots of counterfeits from China is probably something to strive for.
Sure, but "real" industry users want support for the hardware and software. They will pay for support contracts and customization if it saves them in house labor time.
They want inroads into professional control systems / IoT / etc market. Certainly the hobbyist market can't give enough returns, but it's a hugely important funnel into the pro world.
The Arduino is very expensive on the context of mass-produced circuits.
But yeah, maybe they'll use the money to get some cheaper wholesale products. Or maybe they'll expand their hardware to fully support low-scale IoT.
I'm not sure there is enough potential for low-scale IoT for that investment to pay off. But doing something cheaper can indeed work, and requires some money.
Too bad they aren't explaining what they'll do. The buzzword density of the article doesn't add any confidence that the company managers know what they are doing, but it could be a smoke screen.
Not everybody here is "under the roof of a VC". I recently read a very inspiring article here about a successfully bootstrapped company. It's too bad more companies can't get off the ground without VC funding.
I also think the cynicism hits extra hard when this happens with direct-to-consumer and educational companies. I don't think people care quite so much when a B2B company takes a round of funding because whatever change happens there is not something that will likely hit consumers directly, and of course the whole for-profit educational aspect has been been beaten to death.
The thing that sucks about bootstrapping is a VC-backed company can very easily kill your business--more money, neutral or negative margins, more connections, etc. They have an unfair advantage from the gate, and they will most likely be acquired before you do.
It's disappointing because we know exactly what's coming afterwards: the "monetization" which will ruin something that was once great. How many times have we seen it happen? Investors want their returns, they want them now and they will make them turn the screws until all remaining value is extracted.
We may be under the roof of a VC but the site is called Hacker News. Not everyone is gonna be a fan of startups.
Well, considering that many HN users seem to be under the impression that this is a loan ("$54 m of debt to service" etc.) I don't think there's much point in assigning any importance to the opinions.
With equity you just have different obligations, I responded to a rather cynical commenter above on my take. I agree, but it's not free either. Equity holders can exercise power in different manners, usually more hostile due to the decisive power they have.
What power they have depends on the terms, the board composition, etc. and yes they can screw you.
You know that, of course, but really the thing is that the sentiment here is information-free and an indicator of that is the inability to tell the difference between debt and equity. i.e. the sentiment and the result are independent events.
I'm the CTO for a small software firm that does a lot if IoT. We've seen a number of startups build their prototypes using Arduino. Historically, there was no clear path to production. So, I think they're listening to some of their customers, and it is a clear opportunity for them.
On the other hand, positioning yourself as a hobbyist platform, _and_ a "production-grade" platform is tricky. I really like their entry-level boards for hobby-level things. I hope that continues.
Finally, a few thoughts:
1. If you dig into their code, their embedded software has struggled: the architecture is all over the place, the implementation is suspect in some areas, and testing has been weak. Hopefully they back port the new (hopefully improved) code to the hobby hardware.
1. As long as they don't require their cloud, I wish them well in that area. It's a really tough market.
I have used both Arduino boards and our own hardware layer with AVR toolchains. The main USP of Arduino was a good community (people like and easy-to-follow instructions. The target market of Arduino did not want to look inside the IDE. That is the reason they scored over PIC etc. because they never even talked registers.
However, this easy was slapped together in the most unprofessional ways imaginable. IIRC, the SD card code used to have C++ virtual functions when a rock solid library from Chan was available. It was not easy built on a solid core that provided a gradual path to professional setups. It was do-it-and-happy-when-it-works kind of setup.
So I am not sure what direction can they take it in with funding. There is a limit on where easy can take you in the Embedded world, especially if you are looking for reliability and performance.
As I see it (from largely an outsider perspective), there are two difficulties with embedded software: 1) a large sensitivity to performance, to the point where higher level languages are difficult to justify the overhead. And 2) it is generally difficult to write software for embedded systems because the peripherals are all over the place. There is no “one framework to rule them all”, so you need to relearn how to do basic tasks for every new system you use.
I feel like 1 is getting to be much less of a blocker for a huge variety of applications. Most hobbyists don’t even bother with the dedicated built in “spi” pins, they just do spi bit banging on whatever pins they want to use because they don’t have a performance reason to worry about it.
2 is still an issue, and is largely what arduino was trying to solve (for hobbyists at least), by creating a standardized set of tools and libraries.
From that perspective, there is still a lot of work to be done. Modern languages can offer a huge amount of zero cost abstractions for things like HALs, if you can make it easy enough to write the underlying translation layers so you can actually run on the combinatoric explosion of different software options out there. If arduino can make that kind of thing possible, I would assume they could make inroads into the professional world.
As someone who's operated adjacent to this company for a number of years, I think it'll be a good thing for your firm.
1) They're doubling down on enterprise-grade features "with the goal to grow enterprise application libraries"
2) They're doubling down on enterprise GTM "we will use the additional funds to accelerate go-to-market initiatives and customer support in selected areas."
Sounds to me like another nail in the coffin for Arduino as a useful tool for hobbyists.
That said I stopped buying Arduinos years ago and started buying super low cost ESPs from China and I think most other people did too so I guess it's not going to be a huge blow
Yup. I switched to ESPs for projects and won't go back to Arduino. I had to fix someone else's Arduino based art installation a couple weeks ago and it seemed weird and very retro going back to work with that Arduino form factor.
That said, maybe they have a future being a standard component in industrial settings. I would tend to trust an Arduino more than an ESP in critical infrastructure.
> I would tend to trust an Arduino more than an ESP in critical infrastructure.
Arduino has always come across to me as being for hobbyist/beginner/learning, and critical infra would use things more like, for example, STMicro or Texas Instruments microcontrollers
They didn't take debt— they sold equity in the company.
In reality this makes the company MORE financially healthy, while diminishing the payout the founders would get if the company pays dividends or is sold
I mean, it's not free money. The people who gave them the money expect to get the money back plus some profit. Whatever fancy financial words people like to doll that up with, it still sounds to me like debt.
It's literally not debt. Debt is when you borrow money or issue bonds with obligation to repay the principal, plus interest
This is an equity investment: the VCs buy an ownership stake in the company, which they share with the founders. They don't receive "profit"- they get a payout proportion to their ownership stake if the company is sold or retained earnings if the company issues dividends (not common)
I understand, but it doesn't seem like an interesting distinction to me. It's all just different financial ways to say the same thing: they got money from someone and will be expected to pay it back with even more on top somehow later.
Neither is "better" or "worse" for the founder- this is entirely dependent on terms.
This is like saying a credit card is "better" than a home equity loan
As with equity there are MANY investors that only deal in debt- SVB's debt army for example.
Debt is problematic as it weakens the P&L by requiring the company to make interest payments. The rates of which (in venture) are currently in excess of credit card APRs
I’m speaking specifically of early investment in debt, which does not have the impacts you describe and is typically intended to convert to equity. In my experience it is better for the founder than a priced round in basically every sense.
However it is easier to wash out and leaves no cap table trace, which is why some investors do not do it very much anymore.
As a VC you would be talking to people seeking priced rounds, not convertible debt. Angels started using SAFEs because YC started pushing them. It doesn’t mean that convertible notes aren’t better for founders. Founders will conform to the market.
They have been cheap for many years. There are so many great cheap options out there now with good support, ESP, ESP32, Raspberry Pi Pico, Pico W, WeAct Black Pill (STM32), various nRF2 boards.
At this point Arduino is just extremely overpriced and probably only still relevant because it's a household name and people want pin compatibility with the Uno and V5 tolerance for reasons.
How do you have a 100M business selling cheap, niche microcontrollers to hobbyists? They're starting to pursue a subscription model (Arduino Cloud), I'd expect them to shutter products that won't work with the subscription model and require everything else to use it. It's your standard enshitification play.
"Supporting" and "inspiring" hobbyists isn't going to pay the bills, though.
Arduino opened up an ecosystem when they started back in 2005, but the world looks a lot different in 2023. First-party Arduinos are nothing special these days, and their competitors make way better products for far less money. Even the Arduino IDE has been leapfrogged by MicroPython / CircuitPython.
Hobbyists these days just aren't all that interested in Arduino anymore, and there is pretty much nothing paid which they can introduce which will change that.
There isn't any debt to service. Taking funding isn't the same as taking debt (in some ways its worse, in some better), and there's no direct interest or payment they have to make every month like if it was debt.
The problem is that they give up ownership (and probably ownership) to people who may have different goals and values. This can lead to enshittification, especially for a company that doesn't have a good path to extreme growth and profits. You also can't discharge ownership in bankruptcy like you can with debt.
It is not debt, but on other hand anyone investing this pay probably have expectation of return that is higher than a loan would be. And that money must come from somewhere at somepoint...
It's not a loan because it doesn't have to be paid back.
But it operates somewhat worse than a loan because the buyer now has some say in how the company is run, and they will want to see a return on their investment eventually.
A loan may be better because as long as the company can service it, the lenders have no say in how the business is run, and they get no additional profit from increased income/profit of the business.
Technically a VC with less than 50% control can’t do anything to you, so as long as you keep 51% and never sell or liquidate then it’s free money. In practice, they wind up pressuring you to do those things and then they get their money back.
VCs, historically, don't understand this. Arduino did, but they've likely ceded some control by doing this fundraising. Maybe these VCs are different. I'm not counting on it.
You need either at least an order of magnitude more (still iffy, people don't buy boards all the time), or to sell into some larger market. Are there 100M electronics hobbyists to sell to over the world? Maybe if you make it into schools...
Cue up the announcement two years from now about the "exciting" news about joining X megacorp, where nothing will change for users, except things will be better for some reason. Then cue the announcement two years after that where everything does indeed change for users for the worse. Then cue the inevitable open source fork...
Given it all started in 2005, I'm very surprised to see they're raising capital. I guess I incorrectly assumed they would have been very profitable by now with such a large user base & number of units shipped. 18 years is a long time.
The market has moved on significantly from when they first started (Raspberry Pi having launched things like the Pico etc), and there is a large amount of competition, so I do wonder if their growth aims are realistic.
A big problem is that they didn't really innovate.
Companies like Adafruit, Sparkfun, and Pimoroni leapfrogged their hardware products, and eventually ended up developing their own ecosystems when it turned out that the Arduino IDE was more of a liability than a boon.
They were a no-brainer in 2005-2010, but why buy from Arduino in 2023 when you can get a newer product with more features at a lower price from their competitors?
Raspberry Pi has found enough use in industry that it’s gotten hard for hobbyists to find boards. Maybe someone convinced Arduino that there are commercial applications
Makes me curious what their revenue trends look like. From the outside, it feels like many people in the space are using the Arduino IDE, but with MCUs they bought from some other vendor.
Well, way back then, the Arduino IDE was precisely the game changer that made a lot of hobbyists and average people get into embedded systems without much friction or EE background, and not the board based on an Atmega MCU that anyone else could make.
Many eons ago before the Arduino came out, I used to have EE labs in university based on the same Atmega chip but using a commercial IDE-compiler, and boy was that a giant PITA as a young buck, having to read dozens of datasheet pages, calculate by hand all the register values just to get a bloody 1 ms PWM timer output on a pin, which never worked the first time and needed an oscilloscope to debug.
"Oh, you did everything right, but forgot to flip the bit of the correct pin of the output port in the right registry, have fun debugging it for the next 3 hours while you pull your hair out."
And we used "modern" C, not AVR assembly (which is still nice and quite simple to understand once you get the hang of it, don't get me wrong). Sure, as an EE, that was a mandatory right of passage to prep you for a job in the industry, but not something average people would want to do as a hobby.
The fact that you can do that with 2 simple lines of code, from an API, from a well documented library, that's well tested and guaranteed to work, without an expensive commercial toolchain and HW debugger, was the game changer for the hobbyist market.
But this move feels a bit late in the game for them. They should have done this nearly 10 years ago, but now it feels like they squandered their early lead and became sort of irelevant amongst the sea of RPi, ESP32, STM32 with their own easy to use toolchains and libraries.
> Well, the Arduino IDE was precisely the game changer that made a lot of people get into embedded systems, and not the board based on an Atmega MCU that anyone else could make.
Interesting. Personally I find the $OFFICIAL_IDE repulsive, and strongly prefer just writing the code in $MY_IDE, with a Makefile on the side. OTOH I find the "branded" hardware attractive: it's a known quality in an ecosystem that I sometimes find complex and confusing, and I greatly appreciate the work they've put into making the whole process more approachable. Of course I have a couple clone boards at hand, but I will buy branded Arduino by default precisely because I instinctively associate the brand with less hassle.
>Personally I find the $OFFICIAL_IDE repulsive, and strongly prefer just writing the code in $MY_IDE, with a Makefile on the side.
< Insert famous HN comment, on why Dropbox is a useless business idea, berceuse you can easily achieve that for free with a self hosted FTP server[1] >
If you know what a Makefile is, then you're not Arduino's target market, but there are millions of people out there who want to turn a relay ON when some sensor gets too hot for some garage project, without first learning about Makefiles or registers.
In defense of the Makefiles, it's a known quality. They are indeed arcane and somewhat fragmented (BSD/GNU use different conventions; plan9 mk is a far cleaner solution), but you only need to learn them once, and things you've learned about make in the 80s is mostly still relevant in 2023. It's a dragon you only need to defeat once.
The hardest part is probably figuring out the name of the character device, which is about as difficult as figuring out which pin is where on the board. But I guess these kinds of things don't come naturally to everyone, which is why Arduino is successful.
obviously the Arduino IDE is great, but they sell it for $0 so that doesn't seem very directly relevant to how they 10x this big pile of money for their investors.
There was recently a flareup on HN about PlatformIO trying to make money by charging a fee to vendors to be supported (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36090536). Maybe Arduino wants in on that.
I honestly don't see how such strategies work long-term though. As a former embedded SW engineer, the Arduino IDE seems very toy-like - which is excellent for people just starting out, but not something a company developing an embedded product is likely to use. I think PlatformIO is similar but I have only tried that once.
If these companies try to get vendors to pay them to support their boards, or try to start charging users directly, I really think that the hobby community will move on and someone will fork or create their own solution, and the whole cycle will start again.
What is the difference between PlatformIO and something you use to develop for an Embedded platform? To me it seems PlatformIO is just a wrapper around the same command-line tools used by other companies.
It is an easiest way to install and configure all required toolchains on a random computers.
I've used to maintain my own set of Makefiles for AVR, and that was mostly OK because avr-gcc is in ubuntu repos, and all my computers are Ubuntu anyway.
But when I switched to ESP8266, this no longer worked, there are no nice debs with SDKs I could find. I could have created a complex set of Makefiles to download SDKs, compilers and tools.. but I switched to platformio instead to do it all for me.
This turned out to be a great idea when I later wanted to try STM8 and RP2040 - just 2 line change in ini file and you have a fully working toolchain, libraries, etc.. And the ability to easily share the programs with others and to know that they can use them even if they don't run Ubuntu is great too.
That phrase encompasses a huge amount of value. VS Code+PlatformIO is free but I would happily pay for it. I was already paying for an Arduino Visual Studio plugin (Visual Micros) before I learned about it.
"This investment will allow us to further fuel our transformational platform initiative for professional customers, lowering the barriers to entry in IoT and AI by providing a continuum from hardware to Cloud"
That entire sentence makes me want to jump off a bridge.
Want to know more about how the funds will be put to good use? A major chunk will be invested to further strengthen the R&D team based in Turin, Italy, with the goal to grow enterprise application libraries and the Arduino Cloud for Business with more integrations and embedded AI features.
Fools and their money are easily parted, even easier if you slap "Ai", "Enterprise" and "Cloud" in the pitch.
"Finally, we will use the additional funds to accelerate go-to-market initiatives and customer support in selected areas."
Anytime I see the business speak 'accelerate go-to-market initiatives', the company is at its end-game. Any time a leader has to call that out, they are admitting they need to spend a substantial sum of money to solve a problem a small group of kids in a garage can do with some Red Bull.
Every time a cool little company gets VC funding, you know that the free and opensource projects will dry up, and before long they'll be making premium high end products and suing anyone who tries to compete.
I predict they'll go after microcontroller manufacturers first. "Do you want your dev boards supported by the Arduino Ecosystem? Pay us 10% of revenue, and then we'll talk."
Hi (co founder of Arduino here) We're not doing any of that. Our partnerships based on products and whatever processor is the most useful for what we're trying to build. We're mostly working on robust industrial products that maintain the ease of use of the Arduino framework and we sell those to enterprises. very simple
The turkey got to the farm. The Chickens all told him to fear the farmer, that one day the farmer would kill and cook and eat him.
When the farmer came the first time the turkey hid full of fear, but the farmer came and instead of death and fear brought food. The farmer took care of the turkey, feeding him well, making sure he had a warm place to stay. All along the chickens warned the turkey, the farmer was going to come and eat him, but the Turkey thought.
"The Farmer is so nice, he takes care of me so much and loves me, these chickens don't have any idea what they were talking are talking about. They are just foolish scared chickens", the turkey thought.
Then one fateful November day instead of a bag of feed the farmer brought an axe....
Many tech people have seen this happen over and over again, they know that when the VCs come, eventually so will the axe.
VC's don't like to leave money on the table, and there's a long history of companies going back on their promises to their users in the years following accepting VC money.
What if I start to make enterprise products called Coolduino, and I say "my products are for the Arduino framework ecosystem" - will you come after me?
Not-legally-binding tl;dr The "duino" suffix could be a trademark issue. If you rename it and you keep your hardware designs open source you're fine. Otherwise contact them for a proprietary use license.
CC-BY-SA-4.0, so you also can't claim original creation of it, you have to maintain an attribution to the original creator and you cannot change the license.
I don't doubt that they'll try, but I don't think they have the market position to pull that off anymore, not with ESP32 et al. ascendant. Or maybe I'm just out of touch with that side of the market, hard to tell.
A lot of people still program ESP32's with the arduino IDE.
And there are a good number of devices on the shelves of stores today which contain the arduino bootloader. It turns out the "point and click and get a working IoT product" tends to outcompete hiring a professional embedded coder to spend months to make something bespoke from scratch.
My dumb fridge for example runs on top of the arduino bootloader on an atmel chip - it has the distinctive 1 second startup delay and speaks stk500. And all that chip supports is four temperature sensors, two fans, two door switches and lights, a little 7 seg display and up/down buttons for temperature, a defrost heater, door edge heater, and a relay for the compressor motor.
> It turns out the "point and click and get a working IoT product" tends to outcompete hiring a professional embedded coder to spend months to make something bespoke from scratch.
Setting up an embedded toolchain and development/debug workflow from scratch is so tedious. No wonder Arduino (and Micropython) has had so much success. I write Micropython for flight controllers in the High Power Rocketry hobby. I get a lot of snide remarks from the other people doing embedded coding but my stuff runs just fine and i can get to a blinking LED (the helloworld of embedded) on a new board in ..seconds typically.
Those remarks tend to stop when you can add some new feature in 5 minutes which would take a 'proper' embedded dev days.
Eg.:
Gee, it would be nice to measure CO2 high in the atmosphere from our hobby rocket, let me just plonk this CO2 monitor in, hook it up to 2 pins, and add 3 lines of code to read from the sensor and write to an SD card file every second.
Thats the kind of thing that, for most other toolchains/IDE's, would require reconfiguring HAL's to get I2C working, configuring the pins to have the right drive strength and pullups, studying datasheets to find out what registers to read/write to get the sensor going, etc...
Arduino is supporting the official MicroPython project and has released ports for a number of boards in addition to tools like a simple MicroPython IDE and a GUI installer.
True, which is to say they are a competitor with alternate toolchains
If I get a board with an Arm0 chip and want to flash it with micropython, Arduino is not the only game in town (not even my first choice by a long shot, ymmv)
With the lower power AVR chips, Arduino's only competitor was the project it was forked from, Wiring - any other embedded toolchains were not even trying to reach the casual hobbyist, the Arduino IDE dominates that niche.
Pretty sure the "Arduino ecosystem" is more than just the boards. It's also a bunch of libraries that provide a standard interface to a bunch of different hardware as well as tooling to build, flash, and monitor those libraries. While I don't love those libraries or tools, they do a half-decent job of papering over the shockingly painful esp-idf (the equivalent libraries for ESP32 boards) which I understand to be one of the better embedded SDKs.
The problem is that they aren't the only business in town anymore.
A lot of the hobbyist stuff is moving to MicroPython / CircuitPython, PlatformIO is eating the more hardcore market, and professionals will just stick to whatever RTOS & HAL they were already using.
I forsee they'll make all those libraries and tools free for hobbyists - and maybe even 'less than free' - ie. "We'll send you a free dev board if you download the IDE!".
But if anyone tries to ship arduino code in a commercial product, they'll want royalties.
Or if any microcontroller maker wants to be supported by the ecosystem, they'll also want royalties.
And the royalty levels will be low because there are competing ecosystems of tools - but across such a huge market of embedded commercial electronics, I think they'll still do very well.
If you respect the open source license , you're free to use the Arduino code in products. We offer a licensing scheme for companies that want to license the hardware designs to use in proprietary products.
The IDE is there, it's free, it's more powerful than ever and it supports any architecture the community wants to work on. Free, no royalties no licenses etc
The idea of getting 10% of ESP32 revenues sounds pretty funny to me. Based on how absurdly cheap I can buy the assembled boards and have them shipped across the globe, I imagine the margins are razor thin on those anyways. And if they raised prices, I'd move to other products.
> In professional environments no one uses the Arduino IDE
I disagree. In companies with an embedded software team, no. But in companies where software isn't a focus of what the company does, there are plenty of bits of arduino code shipped on millions of devices. For example, my Beko branded fridge (they sell 3 million fridges per year). And my unbranded motion-sensitive security light.
And this is where the brand comes in: "let's try to do it in-house this time, instead of hiring those embedded-mercenaries again. Arduino was originally designed for people even more clueless than us"
Arduino had more impact at making people aware that tinkering with controllers might be fun (or profitable) than the actual amount of tinkering with Arduinos (or clones) suggests. Aiming for that "not the core job description" subset of professionals seems like a very good match.
Not only that, but the popularity of the ecosystem opens up the feasibility of projects that would otherwise not be considered.
As a professional embedded systems engineer, I'm not the "ideal Arduino customer." But having the arduino ecosystem available means that I can build a one-off for a client in a matter of minutes when it would otherwise take days or weeks. That means I become the "embedded mercenary" that they like and want to hire again :-)
> After the first $32 million Series B financing received in 2022, “This investment will allow us to further fuel our transformational platform initiative for professional customers, lowering the barriers to entry in IoT and AI by providing a continuum from hardware to Cloud,” says Arduino’s CEO Fabio Violante.
So... The next versions of the arduino SDK will require a subscription and internet connection to work? (The company is hosted at the UK, isn't it? If it's so, add some invasive spying and selling your data to the list.)
No point to do that. Arduino the platform should remain widely popular among hobbyists; this makes it an easy choice when they have to produce something more professional.
But professionals have different requirements, and are willing to pay for tools that work well. Opening up a professional channel only makes sense if it's buttressed by a large ecosystem outside, with the pressure to keep using Arduino, because it's well-known, hardware is tried and true, hiring is easy, etc.
So, if anything, Arduino the company now has more incentives to make Arduino widely accessible among kids, students, hobbyists, etc.
no they won't... the money is used to develop our Professional products for enterprise customers.. the classic arduino will always be free. We've never build anything that would use licensing servers etc...
BTW Arduino is headquartered in Switzerland/Italy/Sweden/USA so... no UK there
Of course Arduino will be free, with optional/required registration. You will start by selling cheap labor leads to your professional customers. "Hot Arduino programmers in your area are waiting to meet you".
Since I've got you, allow me to apologize for all the knee-jerk cynics in this thread. I trust you will continue to ship great product and that your incentives will remain aligned with those of your users.
Just pinky promise me that you won't make Arduino IDE a subscription :)
Hi (co founder of Arduino here) Good old Arduino is still here, we're still releasing a ton of tools for the community, we're still innovating every day. We're using most of the funds to develop our professional offering. I believe this is a natural progression for companies like us. Our investors leave free to work on whatever technology and let us open source anything we feel can contribute to the community. They never interfere.. The R&D on the Professional products eventually benefits everyone. I strongly disagree with your statement
Not sure if you're as naive as your comments here, or just spouting the standard jargon, but even "We're using most of the funds to develop our professional offering" and " Our investors leave free to work on whatever technology" are in complete disagreement. "They never interfere" - right... I don't doubt you strongly disagree, but history says you're wrong. Maybe Arduino will be the exception but I wouldn't bet on it. You took the money; you made the deal. If ever it comes to a decision that would negatively impact your investors or hold to the original ideals, which way do you think it will go?
That depends entirely on how much control the investors have. For a company as old and established as Arduino and for only $22 million, I’d guess it’s not all that much.
Don't waste time disagreeing with people on social media, just prove them wrong by doing the right thing. People are really downhearted by how things have turned out in the tech industry, but maybe someday we will point to Arduino as one of the companies who turned that around. Good luck!
To word this differently... We here on HN have seen this go wrong 1000 times. But we hope Arduino is the project that manages to accept VC funding and still stay true to its opensource maker roots.
I believe in mentioning origins the parent is referencing your unceremonious fork of the Wiring project
The Arduino corporation has been a great benefit to open source but it's also a classic trope of an advisor taking credit (and profits) for his students' work.
> we're still innovating every day. We're using most of the funds to develop our professional offering
You're not disagreeing with parent commenter and could both be correct!
> Our investors leave free to work on whatever technology and let us open source anything we feel can contribute to the community. They never interfere
At some point, they will expect, then demand returns on their investments, then your focus will mostly be on the professional offering, while the community product gets less love.
It's not a condemnation of your as an individual or your organization: this cycle has played out many times via VC or acquisition.
Have you discussed this with your VCs? Which methods of maximizing revenue have they agreed you will be leaving on the table in perpetuity?
What will happen if you don't make the returns they expect? Do you have a controlling share, or is it possible for them to fire you and replace you with a more compliant CEO?
This sort of thing tends to be a collaboration, until the growth doesn't meet expectations.
Hey thanks for commenting here. I think many people in hn don't realize that Foss projects maintained and managed by a company are used to further a commercial goal otherwise ardunio would go under and then it doesn't matter the state of the Foss stuff. If in the future for whatever reason the sentiment for the Foss portion changes the community can always fork it, or continue development. That's the beauty of open source software.
I'm also biased since I'm building a vc backed product as well.
Super stoked to see how your professional and enterprise offerings turn out. Do you have a public roadmap anywhere?
Glad to see you chime in here. Just curious, is Arduino setup so that the community could takeover if you did somehow go pure enterprise and abandon hobbyists? If I recall, things are pretty open source.
Everything except the name is properly opensource for the OG arduino (Arduino Uno).
For some more recent boards, there are proprietary components and binary tools and blobs - notably the Expressif board packages for the ESP8266 and ESP32's. At least some of the blame for that is with the chip manufacturers and not the Arduino project.
Arduino is not a cool little company. If you start reading about its history you will learn about some Italian dudes running PCB manufacturing for Arduino stealing trademark and registering US company with it. https://makezine.com/article/technology/arduino/massimo-banz... Poor Massimo Banzi got taken advantage of, right?
If you dig even deeper you will find http://arduinohistory.github.io describing how Massimo Banzi stole open source project from one of his students.
Actually we're not going down that path at all. we are still doing the same things we were doing before. we have no plans for "enshittifying" our business model
You're just going to put yourself in a bad spot chasing comments around online.
YOU are not going down that path.
But investors are now the ones shaping the paths.
Arduino is hardly the first company to take on VC money. Everyone here is intimately familiar with how it always plays out, and the dynamics that will force around even the most pure hearted leader.
It's best not to say anything, you are only going to look foolish trying to explain to a bunch of veteran tech heads how "This time its different!".
Honestly I feel like the people who made digital electronics accessible to 2nd graders deserve compensation. I used to organize and teach Arduino robotics classes, and had thousands of students over the years. A handful of those kids even went on to make science fair projects and portfolio projects with Arduino, which set them on a path to a career in engineering.
Even if they completely reverse their open-source approach, I’d still be grateful for the tremendous contribution Arduino has made to education.
By the way, the best way to support Arduino as an individual is to only buy official boards directly from their site.
I think you got it all wrong. VC funding makes things cool because they could afford to loose money and make product better. Enshittification starts when they stop receive VC funding like reddit or docker. Reddit was founded 18 years ago and for the first 10 years it was good because they don't have any pressure to make money.
You seem to forget that some businesses exist before VC funding.
Arduino started out as an open-source project, with further development funded by the sale of physical hardware. They did not need tens of millions of VC funding for that, and they independently developed the "cool stuff" people here care about. Unlike most startups seen here, they were not selling stuff at a loss in the hope of conquering the world and somewhere along the way hopefully figuring out a way to make money. Arduino could've probably continued doing this for decades, but instead they stagnated and were leapfrogged by their competitors.
They only need to raise VC funding in order to expand into new markets because they want to pivot towards "professional engineers with enterprise-scale applications".
Where did I say business couldn't exist without VC? I just said VC money generally seems to make product quality better, even if last only for few years. Here is the list of companies I could find which didn't take VC money:
- Oracle
- Broadcom
- Walmart
- MicroStrategy
These companies have most enshittified products than most other companies, so it is not the VC money that leads to it.
users, especially beginners, like consistency. So you call that "stagnation" I call that "avoid adding stuff that people don't really need". We make more than 100 different products so we haven't stagnated at all.
And yet that "stuff people don't really need" is selling like hot cakes at your competitors, only for a worse variant to eventually show up at Arduino - although it probably won't even be carried by your own distributors. Sparkfun and Adafruit are reinventing the hobbyist ecosystem with STEMMA/Qwiic. Meanwhile Arduino was (despite the failed kickstarter) earlier to market with the competing ESLOV connector - which seven years later isn't even found on your own bread&butter controller boards.
Look, I had fun with Arduino back in the days, but in 2023 you folks simply don't have an attractive product range anymore. When I open Adafruit's website I am almost guaranteed to immediately be greeted by a handful of brand new products which immediately look interesting to me. When I open the Arduino website I have to do a lot of effort to even find a product lineup, and even when I manage to finally get there it isn't at all obvious what I should buy and why.
I own several Arduino products, and I genuinely forgot you existed. For your sake I sincerely hope I just live in a massive filter bubble and am massively mistaken about the hobbyist market.
A VC will not just sit idly when their investment starts going down the sink. They'll do what they can to influence the decision-making towards more revenue. There are exceptions, but the article is rather clear the new round comes from large-cap corporate entities.
Incidentally, and naively, I have to ask: Is there a business model that can promise customers a product that's immune to eventual usurpation? It's a hidden cost to build your world around a product only to see it turn into pay-to-play.
Not only the steps do to this properly would probably kill most companies, but investors would avoid such company like the plague.
They'd basically need to lose all protection on their product, making it a de facto open source (note that there are companies operating on open source stuff, but they actually make money out of the things they don't open source - such as "pro version" or know how). Plus, investors value the pool of recurring customers far more than basic cash flow or such (because you can squeeze them more) and the next best thing is customers you can make recurring customers by moving your product to a subscription model.
The business of VCs is to take risk. VCs _know_ that 8 out of 10 of their investment will return zero, zitch, nada. They just expect one of of 10 to make it even -- and another one to make it 20x.
So that doesn't mean that Arduino is on anything great: it just means it has been able to convince VCs that there's _some probability_ that they will make it big.
But the probability of doing something big is still very low...
( In fact a VC once told me that, 3 months after investing - i.e. a few board meetings max - he already knows if the company will succeed or not. And in 8 out of 10, he will just do the figuration until failure - at best, buy for cents on the dollar)
Good news. I think some ESP32 or RISC-V or similar player will soon push a competitor to Arduino IDE because I think the two things to onetize are the IDE ecosystem and the Arduino brand recognition. My prediction is they'll start by focusing more ion "enterprise Arduino" and later try to somehow monetize the IDE ecosystem (priority treatment for your arch if you pay the low number of X$/year).
Wow, I came to see the comments and saw mbanzi answering, and ohh, boy, everyone is hammering him. He genuinely tries to address concerns and questions, but there are many comments with plain intentions to create a flame. Good job on keeping a cool head and explaining the same thing repeatedly.
Congratulations also. Getting here and raising a significant amount of money is never easy.
Okay, so Arduino is probably done at this point and we'll just see its downfall.
Which leads me to the question: Is there an IDE/language that is as easy as that of the Arduino IDE? PlatformIO is often mentioned, but I don't speak C/C++ and am not really into learning it.
I have a very hard time imagining the Arduino language going away soon, even if anything happened to the company (I don't know anything about the business world, no idea what's going on with them, seems like they're making some cool new stuff).
The community will maintain it. Pretty sure the more interesting implementations aren't even by Arduino (doesn't Espressif do theirs themselves?).
I wouldn't be surprised if long term, we started seeing an Arduino competitor in Rust, the hobby space is the perfect place to start something like that, but for now, I would think Arduino is safe...
Also, you already know C++. Maybe not C, but that's OK, because everything a hobbyist needs to pay attention to is C++. Arduino is just some libraries on top of C++. A really nice and portable set of libraries, with a really cool and easy build process, but not the only set of libraries.
PlatformIO is pretty nice.
But there is something easier than Arduino. ESPHome. It's a YAML declarative kind of thing. Not as general as Arduino but for what it does, it's amazing.
Vastly easier, clearer, and just generally nicer than just writing code, especially when it comes with so many nice features like logging, a web server, and an amazingly reliable LAN API you can call from Python.
They even have OTA updates.
Right now it's got a few missing things, like light sleep, but I suspect it's going to cover a lot of Arduino use cases.
They have a web dashboard written in Python you run from the CLI.
Investors (in the arena) already have a portfolio stuffed full of losing crypto and web 3.0 plays - they cant handle any more exposure unless you sprinkle some Ai sugar on top.
> Another consistent part is earmarked to help Arduino grow even more in the US, where we recently opened an office in Austin, TX and bolstered our presence in Chicago, IL.
Oh! I want to hear more about what they’re doing in Chicago since I’m in Chicago.
Arduino is in the lifecycle stage where they need to accelerate extraction. Unfortunate for some maybe, but as a hobbyist, the ESP hardware and software offerings are miles ahead anyway.
I am surprised like another commenter that Arduino has to raise money, on the other hand. I wish it was a bit clearer on how this money ties into their strategy, are they planning to fund R&D, marketing, or manufacturing. What will Arduino look like in two years, and which stick are we getting enshittified?