HAXLR8R is a venture fund which focuses on entrepreneurs building hardware devices. It offers seed funding ($25,000), office space as well as mentorship along with the other opportunies for 2-4 person startups to take an idea to a product.
HAXLR8R selects startups to work with twice a year and has a dual location (San Francisco and Shenzhen). Its first batch ran from March to June 2012 and has been widely received as the start of a new hardware revolution.
While it seems this 'makes much more sense' these days, the idea came up a little while ago...
Founded by Cyril Ebersweiler, Sean O'Sullivan and Eric Pan, the roots of the program started way back when China.axlr8r was born in 2009. For a reason we still ignore as of today, the summer program for startups based in China incubated not one, but two startups working on hardware startups (including two foreign entrepreneurs coming from abroad).
With a backpack full of lessons learned, Cyril had the chance to meet with the founders of LEAP (David and Michael) and subsequently invested in the company. The experience coming out of this relationship was a final training ground for HAXLR8R, and a final proof of concept at Techcrunch Disrupt with Nextgoals (part of China.axlr8r batch II) convinced us there was a problem to be solved, for entrepreneurs and the sake of innovation.
If you are curious about China.axlr check things out on their website.
HAXLR8R is brought to you by Cyril Ebersweiler and Zach Smith.