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Fitbit paid $23 million for smartwatch maker Pebble, according to Fitbit’s fourth quarter earnings report, released earlier today. This buyout price is less than what was reported earlier, with some publications having reported that Fitbit paid somewhere between $34 and $40 million for the smartwatch startup.
It’s highly unlikely the buyout price exceeded the debt that Pebble racked up over the past five years; and the newly-revealed detail is a sad and final conclusion for a startup that managed to launch its hardware after a record-breaking crowdfunded campaign, captivating a niche crowd of early adopters and app developers with its unique smartwatches.
Fitbit also said that it paid $15 million dollars for Vector, a little-known smartwatch product. All of this is part of Fitbit’s larger efforts to launch its own smartwatch and smartwatch app store this year, despite the struggles that Fitbit has recently faced.
Comments
oh good the story is more sad now
By Culby on 02.22.17 5:29pm
If they accepted "so low" a price they were pretty doomed anyway.
By d0mth0ma5 on 02.22.17 5:38pm
As suspected it seems it was an acquihire/patent grab.
By d0mth0ma5 on 02.22.17 5:38pm
This. http://dilbert.com/strip/2013-03-16
By thatdecade on 02.23.17 1:17pm
A sad end to a great product, Pebble will be missed.
By liamdaly on 02.22.17 5:45pm
:’(
I’ll wear my silver PTR til it dies.
By caspar347 on 02.22.17 5:48pm
I snapped up a second Pebble 2 in case mine dies. I’ll keep wearing them until they stop working or the seemingly unlikely event that a better product (for me) comes along.
By dcormier on 02.22.17 10:30pm
You do realize that it probably won’t be supported anymore after this year right?
By mrxiro on 02.23.17 11:12am
I’m well aware. I’m also aware that almost none of the functionality I use my Pebble for relies on Pebble’s/Fitbit’s servers, so I’m optimistic that the functionality I want may survive longer.
By dcormier on 02.27.17 9:53am
I’m sure the founders of pebble aren’t crying. The employees without a job are another story.
By trickyplayer on 02.22.17 6:28pm
Actually, I’d say that Eric Migicovsky chose to go down with the ship, and from what I’ve read he came out of this neither rich nor poor. A lot of employees moved to Fitbit, and the rest were paid severance. There’s a really good interview on Backchannel that’s worth reading.
I appreciate that Migicovsky believed in his people and products for as long as he could, and only sold when it was clear that the jig was up. Per the Backchannel interview, he liked that Fitbit was really interested in supporting the developers and users; whether that actually happens is out of his hands, but I think his intentions were good.
It’s true that a lot of entrepreneurs will sell off their companies to get rich when the first big offer comes along, but that clearly wasn’t the case here. Migicovsky almost certainly had opportunities to sell out over the past five years when Pebble’s value was much higher, and always stuck to it. That says a lot about his dedication, and I look forward to seeing how his career unfolds.
By Scatterthought on 02.22.17 11:30pm
I agree completely. It’s so easy for a founder to make something shiny, sell it off, and buy a Ferrari. Migicovsky cared about what he was building and made a living doing it. That to me sounds like the best anyone could ask for.
By speediercarrot9 on 02.23.17 12:30am
My awesome Pebble Steel started to get weird today after a year or more of exemplarary reliability. Hope it isn’t due to a recent software upgrade that could be Fitbit poking holes in the hull of the current watches so we all buy whatever they launch from the ashes of Pebble.
I just hope Fitbit launch something with the same awesome tactile ergonomics of the Pebbles but take into account contemporary expectations such as GPS and a larger display. I do not want the abominations that are Android Despair or Apple Watch POS.
Pebble got the smart watch UX and notifications system right from day one.
By TT_Guy on 02.22.17 6:43pm
Was the screen garbled?
By dcormier on 02.22.17 10:30pm
Awesome. Fitbit is great, and I’m glad that got a good deal on new tech.
By mikeyvegas on 02.22.17 6:50pm
I loved Pebble, but I find it really unlikely that Fitbit will be able to make any appealing hardware for the platform.
By Chefgon on 02.22.17 9:26pm
FitBit better make an awesome smartwatch worth buying. Got a Pebble 2 and then this news came out not too long after… I was upset.
By Ruben Sierra on 02.23.17 8:42am
Well, as they were somehow pioneers in this business, $ 23M is not much.. But hey, if I remember right, they started with a kickstarter campaign and for this, $ 23M is not the badest what could happen to them.
By danny_iad on 02.23.17 10:38am
Yikes. These weren’t bad watches and I loved the faces people made for them. But what ruined the watches for me was the garbage screens they used which scratched up way too easily.
By Syntaxkita on 02.24.17 1:21am