Mycroft hits crowdfunding goal in hours, raises $400K for Mark II
February 27, 2018 | Leah Wankum
Mycroft’s Mark II crowdfunding campaign raised eight times its goal — and the tech firm is still counting.
Joshua Montgomery, Mycroft
The Kansas City-based startup set out to raise $50,000 on Kickstarter and garner support from early adopters for its voice assistant product Mark II — similar to Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana. Mycroft “blew through” its goal of $50,000 in about seven hours, said Joshua Montgomery, chief executive officer.
“The entire team has been so excited to have the support of this broad community of early adopters and users,” Montgomery said. “We have backers in Moscow. We have backers in Australia. We have backers all over the world that are so interested in having a voice assistant that is built for them.”
The firm closed its Kickstarter campaign Saturday with $394,572 and 2,245 backers, he added. Mycroft now has migrated to Indiegogo’s InDemand platform and already topped $401,000 total.
“I think people are starting to become aware of what privacy they’re giving up when they adopt technologies from people at Amazon,” Montgomery said. “People are really excited to have an alternative out there that respects their privacy and acts as their agent and not the agent of big tech.”
As of Tuesday, Mycroft’s Indiegogo campaign has another 58 days to go, Montgomery said. Mycroft switched to Indiegogo because it has a separate set of backers that, in general, has minimal overlap from backers of the Kickstarter campaign, he added.
Mycroft’s Indiegogo campaign, which offers discounts on Mark II and other products, “represents the last opportunity for backers to get a discount for backing the project early,” Montgomery said.
“It’s a good way for early backers who demonstrate faith in the project to get some great rewards and to get a discount on the perks,” he added.
Mycroft’s successful crowdfunding efforts come on the heels of its oversubscribed capital round of $1.75 million last month. Those funds will be used to continue growing the team, building software and deploying new products such as Mark II, Montgomery said. Mycroft hopes to hire two developers, as well as enterprise sales professionals, he said.
Mark II software is scheduled to enter beta mode Wednesday and will continue for about a year until the software is ready for production, Montgomery added.
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