Eric Migicovsky and Pebble: The Smartwatch That Died and Came Back

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Eric Migicovsky took his idea for a smartphone-connected watch through Y Combinator, earned real revenue during the program, and raised $375,000 from angel investors including Tim Draper. Venture capitalists still turned him down, wary of the tooling, inventory, and recall risks of hardware. So in April 2012 he renamed his company Pebble Technology and put the watch on Kickstarter with a $100,000 goal. It hit that mark in two hours and went on to raise more than $10.2 million from nearly 69,000 backers.

This episode follows the whole arc: the scramble to manufacture, the e-paper screen that gave Pebble a week of battery life, one million units shipped by the end of 2014, and a second campaign that raised $20.3 million. It also covers the reported $740 million offer from Citizen that Migicovsky declined, the 2016 insolvency, and the modest sale of software assets to Fitbit. Then comes the unlikely sequel, after Google released the Pebble OS code in January 2025 and its founder started again.

Before Pebble, Migicovsky built a watch called the inPulse for BlackBerry devices under the company name Allerta.
E-paper draws power only when the image changes, which let Pebble last a week while rivals struggled to get through a day.
The Fitbit deal, reported at between $23 and $40 million, brought job offers for 40 percent of the staff and a pledge to keep Pebble's servers running.
A fan group called Rebble reverse engineered the service and kept the watches working, funded in part by a $3 monthly subscription.
The founder's new company recovered the Pebble trademark in July 2025, clashed with Rebble over the app archive, and open sourced its mobile app that December.

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