Growth of hardware accelerators and consultants in last two years making hardware startups easier
Nick Statt / CNET :
Context & Ripple Effects
In early 2015, the tools around a hardware founder were multiplying: a record $68.4M hardware crowdfunding quarter showed demand-side validation was available off the shelf, and YC's Summer 2015 Demo Day batch carried a visible contingent of physical-product companies. The accelerators and consultancies CNET profiles are the supply side of that same shift — contract design, manufacturing know-how, and distribution advice that previously had to be built in-house.
What makes the piece worth revisiting is how the capital side caught up: chip startup funding roughly doubled to $1.5B+ within two years, then swelled to $12B of equity investment in 2020, an 8x rise since 2016.
First-order effects
- Hardware founders can now outsource prototyping, tooling, and manufacturing guidance to accelerators and consultants instead of hiring those disciplines internally, cutting the time and capital needed to reach a first shippable unit.
- Early-stage investors face a wider pipeline of hardware deals at seed stage, because the fixed costs that used to gate entry are now services bought per-project.
Second-order effects
- Venture firms that avoided hardware's capital intensity begin re-entering the category — the pattern shows up directly in chip investing, which nearly doubled to $1.5B+ in 2017 and kept compounding toward the $12B raised in 2020.
- Crowdfunding platforms and accelerators become de facto gatekeepers and market-research layers, since a funded campaign doubles as demand proof for the next institutional round.
Third-order effects
- If the service layer keeps maturing, hardware formation starts resembling software formation — more startups competing on design and speed while manufacturing is rented — which structurally favors capital-light silicon and device companies over vertically integrated incumbents.
- The endpoint visible in the corpus is a sustained capital supercycle for semiconductor startups, where investor appetite tracks the falling cost of starting rather than the rising cost of fabrication.
The trend: Shared accelerator and consulting infrastructure is industrializing hardware startup creation, and venture capital has been following that cost curve from crowdfunding in 2015 to multibillion-dollar semiconductor rounds by 2020.