Kickstarter Pebble Time Steel on Track to Raise $50 Million via Rewards-based Crowdfunding Campaign

New color screen, water-proof, wearable SmartWatch simplifies communication while on the go and may have a chance to set a world crowdfunding record by catching the current champion, Star Citizen

By Robert Hoskins

United States – No one would be more proud than Dick Tracy to read the funny pages and watch his wrist watch spring from the comic book pages to a real life Pebble Time SmartWatch. Thanks to rewards-based crowdfunding, which brought this brilliant idea from the laboratory bench to the worldwide marketplace, at it’s current clip, the Pebble Time watch is raising around $98,286 per hour on Kickstarter.

Pebble Time Steel SmartWatch May Set Crowdfunding World Record

At the time of this writing, there were 4 hours left to go in the day (3/3/15) and extrapolating the hourly earn rate puts the campaign at right around $15,065,431 at midnight.

With 552 hours left to go, at it current pace, there is a real good chance that the Pebble Time watch may raise up to $49.9 million. But as with many crowdfunding campaigns there may a surge toward the end of the fundraising effort that pushes the numbers over $80,000,000.

Not only would Pebble regain the record for the most funded Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign of all time, but they would also surpass the current world crowdfunding champion, Star Citizen, which last time I checked had raised around $72 million.

And many campaigns will start adding stretch goals or bonus items, such as the metal and leather wristbands that were added toward the end of the first week.

At $80 million, Kickstarter’s 5% commission would pay an amount of $4,000,000. Not bad for a 30-days worth of hosting a single crowdfunding campaign. 

It is also worthy to note that no equity was sold to raise this money.  There are definitely benefits of pre-selling products to test marketplace demand. Pebble Time’s venture capital and institutional investors should be quite pleased at this display of customer loyalty. It also shows the value of conducting multiple successful campaigns in a row. 

“George Zachary, a partner at Charles River Ventures and the first institutional investor in Pebble, said [back in June 2014] that the company’s revenue hit $43 million in [2013] and will double in 2014. Speaking on stage at the Silicon Valley Open Doors Conference he called Pebble the fastest-growing start-up he’s ever backed, a group that includes Twitter and Yammer, which Microsoft bought in 2012 for $1.2 billion.” – Source: CNBC

It will be interesting to see what the company’s valuation will be once the campaign has concluded. Perhaps a lucrative Initial Public Offering (IPO) will be next!  Or will Facebook decide to add another cool gadget to its growing Kickstarter collection? Time will tell.

# # #

Advertisement