"It's fun." Sometimes, it's that simple. Making a sphere controllable is no easy feat and the team at Orbotix has some pretty impressive chops when it comes to sophisticated robotics. As a result, we're excited to announce our newest investment in Orobtix (based in Boulder, Colorado). Orbotix is the company behind Sphero, the world's first robotic ball that you can control with your smartphone. We first met founders Ian & Adam at TechStars last summer where they wowed us with their vision of creating flexible hardware platforms that can be controlled from a smartphone. We loved their idea of open sourcing the API's for these devices so that other software developers could bring their own apps to life on their platforms. The real magic however is just playing with it. There's something uniquely satisfying and fun about controlling a ball with your phone. My kids couldn't get enough of the prototype and can't wait for the product release. They've been busy scheming and imagining new games with their friends for Sphero. The icing on the cake for us was when Ian and Adam decided to bring on veteran CEO Paul Berberian. The combination of Ian & Adam's technical wizardry coupled with Paul's experience as a leader is a terrific combination. We think this team has all the ingredients to create an entire new category of gaming, an enormous opportunity. Lastly, I'm looking forward to finally working with my good friend Brad Feld from Foundry Group (who co-invested with us in this $5 million financing) on the board. Brad and I have become good friends over the years and judging by our first board meeting with Paul a few weeks ago, we're going to have a lot of fun working with Paul, Ian & Adam in making balls do things nobody's ever seen before...      

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 7th, 2011 at 9:01 am and is filed under Portfolio, techstars, VC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.