On Saturday October 24, Glowforge’s campaign for their 3D laser printer made crowd funding history, according to its recent press release. The Seattle based tech firm raised $27,907,995, eclipsing previous record of $20,338,986 held by Pebble Technology for the Pebble Smartwatch. Though the 30-day campaign ended on October 24th, as of the writing of this article customers are still able to pre-order the printer on Glowforge’s website and receive a 40% discount.
Prior to the campaign Glowforge received $9,000,000 in investments from True Investors and Foundry Group. In view of this the tech firm set an initial goal of only $100,000 to simply place the first factory order. Within just two hours this goal was accomplished, and after 14 hours their crowd funding campaign had made its first million. Over the course of the next two weeks Glowforge raised about $400,000 a day
Glowforge’s 3-D laser printer is designed to print out aesthetically pleasing while still durable items, utilizing everything from wood, to leather, and even fabric. Glowforge CEO and co-founder Dan Shapiro remarked, “We set out to build a tool that a small community of designers and engineers would fall in love with. What we found was far more profound: a world of artists, hobbyists, entrepreneurs, and crafters who had been overlooked by modern technology companies. They brought ideas to us that we’d never dreamed of: printing mountain rescue kits, miniature biospheres, and even leather plague masks for Halloween”.
