INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
As the company announces that it has both begun shipping the Light Phone II to Indiegogo backers and made the product more directly
As of this writing, the company has raised $12.3 million.The crowdfunding parts we knew about, of course
The original phone raised a solid $400,000 on Kickstarter
The Indiegogo campaign for the second version blew that out of the water at $3.5 million with an emphasis on pre-orders
Turns out VCs are getting in on the action, as well, with $8.4 million raised in seed
Hinge Capital, Bullish, White Bay Group, Able Partners, Product Co-Op and HAX have all chipped in, but the leader is the most interesting of
the bunch.Foxconn is the biggest investor of the bunch
The manufacturing giant, naturally, is also helping the company build the handsets and scale things as Light looks toward retail channels
Smartphone has ruined my life
could deliver core functionality while weaning users off of smartphone dependence
John Zimmer (Lyft), Michael Mignano and Nir Zicherman (Anchor), Tim Kendall (Moment) and Scott Belsky (Adobe) have all invested, as
well.Like the original Light Phone, the new version presents a sort of built-in paradox for its creators
counter-productive?The new model will get ridesharing (partner to be announced), music playback (likely via on-board storage for starters),
turn-by-turn direction and find my phone features
Among other things, the functionality of those features will be limited by the E Ink display
The phone also finds the company making the jump from 2G to LTE
The company is looking to push those users toward the Light Phone 2
That device, meanwhile, has around 10,000 pre-orders at present.
