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Boulder-based connected toy company Orbotix is making some smart and well-timed moves this year. Just last week Orbotix, which makes the smartphone-controlled robotic ball Sphero, tacked on another $1 million to its $15.5 million raise in May. Not to mention, the company was just accepted to the Techstars-run Disney Accelerator last week and is gearing up for a new product launch this fall.
“We are off to the races this year,” COO Jim Booth said.
The additional million in capital brings Orbotix’s total funding to about $32 million since it was founded in 2010. Foundry Group and Highway 12 Ventures have continually backed the fast-moving company.
The funding comes at the perfect time, as the Orbotix team has a few big things going on right now, like the Disney Accelerator program. Ian Bernstein, who is CTO and a founder, and Adam Wilson, who is Chief Software Architect and a founder, plus a few others are stationed out in LA for the program. Bernstein and Wilson will likely set up shop permanently in LA - but for now, their main objective during the three-month accelerator is to drum up fresh connected toy products. All their big ideas are being kept hush-hush until the program’s October Demo Day.
Meet Orbotix’s newest robot Ollie
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But the priority for the majority of the 43-person team is launching the newest Orbotix product, Ollie, in time for the holiday season. Ollie, a two-wheeled tube-shaped robot controlled by smartphones, was first introduced at CES in January.
Although no other gaming or toy developer has a product like Ollie, Orbotix still has some tough competition: the new consoles, apps and static (aka traditional) toys that crowd the market (and therefore people’s budgets) during the holiday season.
“Because we are an early leader in the space, we holistically compete with people’s purchasing power,” Booth said. “You are always going to have consoles, always going to have static toys, but not a lot of folks are really fusing play experiences like us.”
Combining ‘students, parents, robots and kids’
Meanwhile, the team is bringing this ‘fused play experience’ to classrooms via their SPRK program (which stands for students, parents, robots, kids - cute, eh?). By playing with Sphero via SPRK lessons, kids learn basic programming, robotics and math concepts.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaNmAjxxIDU]
Orbotix in Boulder
To keep up with all these moving parts (robot pun intended), the Orbotix team is looking to hire about 10 to 15 people in the coming year. In fact, they’ve already made room for these new hires by moving from downtown Boulder out to East Boulder.
Though part of their team is now in LA, Orbotix plans to stay planted in Boulder. The support of Brad Feld (who said he is “obsessed” with the connected play market) and of the entire Techstars network (they went through the Boulder program in 2010) have been “absolutely crucial” to Orbotix’s success, CEO Paul Berberian said.
Today, Orbotix has hundreds of thousands of users playing with its “incredible pieces of hardware that have enormous computing power.” Kids, Booth said, find the connected play toys a “completely normal” part of their play routine and while adults find the products “absolutely magical.”
“We think that there’s no doubt that kids love toys,” Booth said. “But now kids are moving away from physical toys at a younger age. We think you lose something special when your entire playing experience is sitting on a couch using an app. Our products are for little kids and big kids, the tech-forward family and tech-geek parents. We connect hardware and software and then use the cloud to deliver some pretty crazy gaming experiences.”
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