Summary

Total Kickstarter funding in the Technology category has already surpassed its 2020 record in 2025, but the structural shift is in China: Chinese projects’ share has risen from roughly 30% in 2020 (about $60M-$80M) to more than half. The number of high-quality Chinese projects has climbed from roughly 900-1,000 last year to 1,500-2,000 this year. Excluding the single largest project, funding for Chinese projects was still up about 17% year over year around October. Henri cautions that the market is smaller than people imagine—the entire ecosystem “may involve only around 10,000 people”—while the combined barriers across hardware, going global and software remain high.
Anker’s eufyMake set a global Kickstarter crowdfunding record with $46.76M, and the decisive move was to “create an entirely new category”—turning 20-30 years of industrial UV-printing technology into a desktop consumer product rather than adding features to an existing category. Its organic-traffic share was roughly twice the 20%-30% average project level, because Kickstarter has around 20M-25M monthly active users and remains a creative-driven platform; the previous global record was a sci-fi novel that raised about $45M. Behind it was Anker’s organizational model: every flagship and new product from each sub-brand goes through Kickstarter, and someone only 2-3 months into the company can end up running a crowdfunding campaign for an entirely new brand.
Henri divides crowdfunding and the globalization of Chinese brands into 3 stages that track the evolution of cross-border e-commerce. Stage 1, through 2016-17, was about taking products from zero to one, with Makeblock as the pioneer; Stage 2, beginning in 2017-18, saw the trade war force a brand-led playbook and a full-stack agency ecosystem—“using innovative methods to sell innovative products”; Stage 3, starting in 2023, is defined by AI, with Bambu Lab’s MakerWorld likened to “CapCut for the 3D-printing world,” lowering the barrier to entry while AI expands the realm of possibility.
Kickstarter positions itself as a “public-benefit company”: it charges only platform fees, has no advertising business, and “purely looks at whether your product works and whether your team can execute.” Its review process has tightened from the early days, when “a video and a PowerPoint” could get a project live, to phone-shot, unedited “bare-faced demos”; at the payment-collection stage, it proactively removes malicious order data to protect creators. Trust is the platform’s core asset.
“You are not a buyer, you are a backer”—backer culture is the foundation of the model. The payment is a donation-like pledge, and third-party research cited by a professor suggests that roughly 9% of pledged money may wait 3 years, 5 years or longer; one beer-machine project launched in 2016 and delivered only in 2024, sustaining communication through reports “every month or every quarter” for 8-9 years. “In the end, it still comes down to the person’s own staying power,” which is why Henri refuses to forecast the next hot sector: “Innovation is innovation.”
MAD360—Xiaomi, Anker, DJI and Insta360—each represents a distinct winning formula. Xiaomi uses technology democratization to build the market and mature the supply chain (Narwal’s logic was “we have to do it precisely because Xiaomi did”); Anker excels at organizational iteration and delegation (Yang Meng’s answer on eufyMake’s direction was, “I have no idea—the team decided”); DJI was the inflection point—“there is only before DJI and after DJI”—after Wang Tao predicted in 2013 that the handheld gimbal would ultimately become an integrated product, a view later validated by Pocket; and Insta360’s content community is something even Wang Tao has asked his team to study, with Henri calling an eventual showdown between Insta360 and DJI as early as 2018.
Two forward-looking tracks stand out: creativity tools still have “100x the opportunity,” while AI hardware will land through specific use cases. Examples include a Bilibili creator’s color-conversion algorithm that turns 8 colors into 1,000, and desktop 5-axis CNC entering a boom phase. Henri’s most bullish call is that for any consumer brand making physical products, “over the next 10 years, or certainly within 20, Chinese companies will be number one—and may even take the top 3.” The missing piece is China’s backer ecosystem, which still lacks an Alipay-like trust intermediary.

Deep dive

1. Sixteen Years of Crowdfunding: From Artist Projects to Chinese Hardware Going Global

Henri’s timeline starts with Kickstarter’s founding in 2009, when the platform was used to crowdfund exhibitions and concerts by artists. The inflection point came in 2011-12, when consumer electronics arrived: Pebble Watch, an e-ink smartwatch, raised more than $10M in a single campaign and over $40M across 3 campaigns. The market realized that crowdfunding was “an extremely good fit for technology products”: validate demand first, then raise the money to manufacture.
The 3 stages mirror the globalization of brands through cross-border e-commerce. Stage 1, through 2016-17, was dominated by overseas brands, with China’s pioneers including Makeblock—“what is now xTool”—and Mobvoi. Stage 2, from 2017-18 through 2022-23, saw the trade war force a brand-led approach, producing EcoFlow and Narwal. Stage 3, after 2023, is about more than hardware innovation and brand-building: it also encompasses software and ecosystems, represented by Bambu Lab and PLAUD.

2. The First-Stage Windfall: Low Barriers and Hidden Projects

Why crowdfund after raising capital? “Back then, the money you raised might not be enough to make the product or sufficiently validate the market.” Backers paid upfront, allowing creators to know exactly how many units to make in the first batch and how to improve the product.
Anker once tested a Bluetooth-headphone brand anonymously around 2014-15, before it had the Soundcore sub-brand, and raised $2M-$3M. Only later did people discover that the project was actually Anker’s. Today, large-model companies also use independent entities to quietly develop hardware and launch it on the platform. “We know what everyone is working on. The only reason I can still operate here is that we keep our mouths shut.”

3. The Platform’s DNA: A Public-Benefit Company That Charges Only Platform Fees

“A lot of people think we’re a nonprofit, but we’re not—we’re a public-benefit company.” Commercialization is “a means to create greater impact.” Kickstarter monetizes only through platform fees and has no ad-buying system; internal traffic is distributed through algorithms, editorial attention and scheduling, and projects do not pay extra for exposure.
Distribution is deliberately “very platform-like”: “We don’t say that because you’re a major project with a big budget, you get more traffic. We purely look at whether your product works and whether your team can execute.” That has turned early innovators and early adopters into a tightly connected community.
Kickstarter hires from the community: North American colleagues came from industrial-design firms, while overseas colleagues came from curators and artist circles; “the person in charge of every category used to be part of that circle.” The platform almost never cold-calls projects. Most arrive through referrals, and decisions are made with the practical judgment of people who have built products—a model Henri describes as “a bit like editorial curation.” The host therefore suggested Henri raise a fund and invest himself, arguing that he may meet promising founders earlier than seed investors do.

4. Tighter Standards and Anti-Fraud: Show the Bare-Faced Demo

In Phase 1, “a video and a PowerPoint” were enough to get a project live. Today, Kickstarter requires phone-shot footage with no editing that showcases the core function. When Bambu Lab first submitted a project using DJI-style glossy renders, it failed the initial review and was asked to provide more real footage of the product in testing: “Show us your demo with no makeup; it can’t be heavily retouched.”
Cross-border e-commerce-style reciprocal and malicious orders have spread to Kickstarter. At the end of a campaign, during the payment-collection process, the platform reviews the data and removes malicious pledges so they do not drive up refund rates. Projects that evade questions or refuse to engage may be problematic; historically, this has happened roughly twice, triggering deeper checks of traffic and conversion.
The Project We Love badge represents personalized recommendation and platform endorsement. “When we use our resources to push a project, we’re endorsing it to some degree,” which is why Kickstarter emphasizes connecting early and establishing trust first.

5. Backers Are Not Buyers: 9% of the Money May Be Waiting

A recurring scene in the community: when a delayed project is harshly challenged, an old backer steps in to say, “You are not a buyer, you are a backer.” The payment is a pledge—a donation-like form of support—and a pop-up at checkout explicitly warns that the backer may never receive the product.
Research by a professor outside the platform suggests that roughly 9% of the money may wait 3 years, 5 years or longer, though “it is difficult to define what counts as non-delivery.” One beer-machine project launched in 2016 and delivered in 2024. Along the way, the team opened a craft-beer barbecue restaurant, restarted work on a commercial product, received investment during the pandemic, later went to market through Xiaomi, returned to CES and finally delivered. For 8-9 years, it maintained communication with backers through reports “every month or every quarter.”
Henri declines to predict which sectors will lead next: “It’s not that we don’t want to talk about it—we genuinely have no way to judge.” Innovation itself has no fixed template; there is no need to force the label “hard tech” or “incremental innovation” onto it. “Innovation is innovation.”

6. Community-Led Rescue for Failed Projects: The OASA-Mammotion Match

The standard approach is to stay in contact with the team and help it “explain the situation to backers in a better way,” sometimes drawing on personal relationships to find another company willing to help.
The best example was OASA’s drum-style lawn mower, whose mass-production difficulty was “far beyond the team’s expectations,” making delivery impossible. Henri connected the backers with Mammotion, a leading lawn-mower brand that emerged from Kickstarter, and its founder 魏启东, who offered them a special discount. Backers received a good product while the original team eased its after-sales burden. It was a leading brand taking responsibility for the industry—“a small form of help that people deeply embedded in this community can provide.”

7. The Second Stage: “Using Innovative Methods to Sell Innovative Products”

Many leading service providers were founded in 2017-18 by operators who had worked on the client side during the first stage. “Big companies gave them plenty of ammunition and plenty of budget; they had practiced with all of it.” They turned that project experience into systematic operations spanning prototype seeding, testing, PR and paid acquisition.
Reviewers became critical because entirely new categories had no obvious benchmark. Before portable power stations, outdoor electricity meant gasoline generators; “you can’t highlight your distinctive features by benchmarking against that, so you have to rely on reviewers to explain them.” The reach of leading tech creators also took off during this period.
The backdrop was the way Made in China entered Western homes through cross-border e-commerce in 2015, raising consumer expectations but largely competing on value. Then “more ambitious, high-end brands with premium pricing began to emerge.” With Amazon’s rule changes and tariffs adding pressure, the logic became: “If I want to make innovative products, I have to use innovative methods to sell innovative products.”

8. Henri’s Entrepreneurial Starting Point and DJI as Inspiration: A Born-Global Generation

Henri started his company in 2015 and got off the ground in 2017 through crowdfunding and a DTC site. He found Casey Neistat’s address and mailed him a product, which produced an 11-minute video; DJI began working with Casey the next day. “We didn’t spend a single cent.” That generation of post-90s entrepreneurs came with a “born-global mindset” from day one.
DJI was the model. Henri’s classmates at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology were interning there as early as 2009-11, and in 2013 “DJI’s aircraft fell out of the White House,” breaking into the mainstream. It showed them that an innovative product could create an entirely new category and a globally recognized brand. 诗婕 also recalled helping Insta360 send a camera to Casey; she was one of the earliest users of Insta360’s Nano, and the product still works today.

9. How to Spot a Breakout: Double Match, Then Push It to CES

The path for this year’s Ropet project was still community-driven. A mutual friend made the introduction, and while the founder was in Shenzhen on business, he brought the product to a hotel near Henri’s office. Henri liked its cuteness and its more companionship-oriented, developmental approach. His framework requires 2 matches: founder-project fit and product-market fit. Once both clear, “I just keep pushing him”—sending him to CES, putting the product in Kickstarter’s booth and recommending it to everyone. “After CES blew up, the projects you see this year started appearing like shoots after the rain.”
The 2 questions to ask before crowdfunding are: Is the company committed to building a global brand from day one, with Europe and the US as its core markets for the first 2-3 years? And is the product mature enough to withstand today’s tighter review standards?

10. Why China Has No Backers: It Needs a Crowdfunding “Alipay”

The structural difference is that overseas companies came through the PC era. Building a brand meant “doing business in a large apartment and swimming in the ocean,” with data that could support advertising across an entire category. China moved directly into mobile e-commerce, where “every app is an island of data,” while consumers developed an expectation of convenient delivery. Domestic platforms that copied Kickstarter ultimately became presales, because laws and regulations—including e-commerce law—generally require a product to be delivered.
Henri had 3 wishes for Kickstarter in 2021. The first was help refining products—connecting data feeds from Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel and introducing installment payments—and has been achieved. The second was to increase the traffic ratio versus other platforms from 3-4 to 1 to “80-90 to 1”; that has also been achieved, because “once you pursue globalization through going overseas, it’s basically impossible to bypass us.” The third, still unfinished, is China’s backer ecosystem. “Connecting WeChat Pay and Alipay is one button—but it isn’t actually one button,” because it involves regulation, tax and user psychology.
His analogy is that Taobao and JD.com took off because Alipay escrow built trust. “Once crowdfunding comes to China, it needs an Alipay in the middle.” This year, Kickstarter began opening authorized offline retail spaces and incubating projects with local governments—an effort to evangelize the model to consumers. The precise mechanism is “still being explored.”

11. The Essential Difference in the Third Stage Is AI: Bambu Lab as “CapCut for 3D Printing”

AI has 2 application paths: separating software from hardware and turning it into a better standalone feature, and using AI to build communities more effectively. Bambu Lab and PLAUD are typical examples: both innovate inside an existing category by layering software, ecosystems and community mechanics onto hardware.
Without MakerWorld, Bambu Lab “would not be the size it is today.” It lets people who want to print but do not want to model simply select a design, choose colors and customize it. The host’s analogy is “CapCut for the 3D-printing world.” Henri adds that once a new business model lowers the barrier, AI raises the ceiling of what is possible.

12. eufyMake’s $46.76M Record, Part 1: Category Creation and the Anker Model

The $46.76M campaign is the largest in Kickstarter history and came from Anker’s eufyMake. The prerequisite was Anker’s organizational innovation: every flagship and new product from each sub-brand goes through Kickstarter, and an employee only 2-3 months into the company may run a crowdfunding campaign for an entirely new brand. “You have to do the content, the advertising and the product,” forcing a complete understanding of the business before moving to the next direction. Anker’s failed attempt to develop a 3D printer in-house, followed by its pivot into UV printing, also shows its ability to iterate continuously through organizational design.
The record was not built through feature stacking. “It completely created a new category.” UV printing is a 20-30-year-old industrial process; eufyMake miniaturized it, added software and made it DIY-friendly, supporting different materials and sizes while producing a roughly 5 mm-thick “2.5D” printmaking effect.

13. eufyMake, Part 2: The Organic-Traffic Dividend of a Creative-Driven Platform

Why was eufyMake’s organic-traffic share twice the 20%-30% average? Kickstarter has roughly 20M-25M monthly active users—“possibly more than all other platforms combined by another factor of 10”—and Design & Technology accounts for only 40%-50% of the platform. The rest is board games, creative work, film and novels; the previous global record was a sci-fi novel series that raised about $45M. “A group of users obsessed with creating gathers here. If you can give them a tool for creativity, they will welcome it with extraordinary enthusiasm.” That is also why 3D printing has been so hot on Kickstarter.
The campaign was intensely user-led. Its promotional film featured a graphic designer and a home visual artist who printed a child’s drawing and turned it into wall art. The only offline experience point was an authorized store, where printmaking master 应天齐 became visibly excited: “I’ve spent my entire life making art out of concave and convex forms.” 诗婕 added that they plan to work with him on merchandise and create together with teenagers.

14. 2025 Data: Above 2020—and This Time China Is Carrying It

As of August 30, total 2025 Kickstarter funding in Technology had surpassed the 2020 peak, but the composition was different. In 2020, Chinese projects raised roughly $60M-$80M and accounted for just over 30% of the category; overseas still had many strong hardware projects, while many Chinese projects that had planned to go global and refine their products were pushed into later years. The 2020 peak was mainly supported by overseas projects. This year, China accounts for more than half, and even excluding the largest project, funding was still up 17% by around October. The category has “basically maintained growth of the high teens to 20% every year.”
Overseas projects are becoming less technology-driven and more dependent on product definition: Peak Design’s camera backpack raised more than $10M, while an influencer’s self-designed “new Swiss Army knife” raised several million dollars to more than $10M. The reason is supply-chain migration. “I just came back from Silicon Valley, and in hardware, China really is where you look now.”
China’s representative tier includes Snapmaker’s multi-head, multicolor 3D printer, which raised $20M and which Henri believes is currently Kickstarter’s highest-funded 3D-printing project; and Libonovo’s smart ergonomic chair, which raised more than $9M. “Why are all the works by great designers chairs? The more ordinary an object is, the harder it is to reinvent—but they did it.” A desktop 5-axis CNC project also went live, showing that CNC has entered a boom phase: it can machine metal directly and even produce parts for mass production.

15. MAD360: What Separates Xiaomi, Anker, DJI and Insta360

Xiaomi: technology democratization opens the market, educates users and matures the supply chain. Narwal’s counterintuitive logic says it all: “We have to do it precisely because Xiaomi did.” Once the giant has educated the market, differentiated innovation can follow. Henri understood the constraint when he worked on electric skateboards: “You can’t achieve cost-down through a single company.”
Anker: data-driven and insight-driven organizational capability. Asked how Yang Meng chooses the direction for eufyMake, the answer was: “I have no idea—the team decided.” The model combines delegation with continuous organizational iteration, while identifying promising categories and projects early enough to acquire them outright when necessary.
DJI: Henri saw its judgment up close. In 2013, while he and his classmates were working on a handheld smartphone gimbal, Wang Tao told them during campus recruiting: “Whether it directly clamps onto a phone or works some other way, it will ultimately be an integrated product. The only reason it isn’t one now is that our cameras aren’t small enough.” Pocket later proved him right, and its commercial value was “on a completely different scale.” “In this entire history, there is only before DJI and after DJI. It is a watershed.”
Insta360: the combination of product, community and content. “I’ve also heard privately that Wang Tao has asked his team to study how Insta360 does marketing, branding and content.” When Insta360 released its invisible selfie stick in 2018, Henri told both sides, “You will eventually have a showdown.” He is “not surprised at all” that the companies now compete. “Why wouldn’t consumers benefit from having another choice?”

16. Looking to 2026: Creativity Tools Still Have 100x Upside, and “Not Doing Kickstarter Once Would Be a Regret”

Whether a mature company should use Kickstarter depends on its day-one growth model. Anker’s early growth came from Amazon, so it needed Kickstarter to test new brands and cover new categories. DJI and Insta360 already had strong DTC sites and brand foundations, so they launched through their own channels—unless they enter a new category with a sub-brand, or geopolitics forces a different choice.
2 trend lines stand out. Creativity tools will continue to deepen: “In my mind, there is still 100x the opportunity here,” as shown by a Bilibili creator’s algorithm for turning 8 colors into 1,000. AI hardware will land by scenario—meeting and office use, commuting, home appliances and kitchen, and sleep—with “unique companies able to emerge from every one of them.”
The end-state call is unequivocal: for any consumer brand that needs to produce a physical product, “over the next 10 years, or perhaps within 20, Chinese companies will definitely be number one and may even take the top 3.” Asked what worries him most, Henri said, “I don’t feel there is much to worry about. I feel this is bound to happen.” His only warning was not to let Shenzhen become too concentrated and insular: do not fear sharing, and “more frequent collisions in smaller circles can be a good thing.”
In the closing exchange, Henri called Kickstarter a Plan B rather than the mandatory choice the host described. Still, for founders committed to building global innovative brands, “not doing Kickstarter once would be a regret”—even Honor has come to exchange views. The charter’s spirit brought the episode to a close: “Everyone should create. Everyone should try.”

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