Exploride’s fantastic gadget just made it India’s biggest crowdfunding success

Update [as of 1 Nov 2017]: We have received a few emails from customers who paid for this product on Indiegogo and hasn’t yet received it. Please note that this article does not endorse the product.

Tech in Asia was the first to write about Exploride the week before it launched on Indiegogo. Today it has become the biggest crowdfunding success story for a startup from India, raising over US$500,000 in 40 days. Crowdfunding hits for smart gadgets made in India are rare, but this one looked a winner from the very beginning.

Exploride is a transparent, glass heads-up display (HUD) that sits on the dashboard of your car, letting you see maps, take calls, play music, change the volume, and read texts without looking away from the road into a smartphone or the dashboard. You control it all with gestures and voice.

It’s a standalone device powered by a quad-core processor, which can double up as a wifi hotspot in the car. It has a camera that recognizes gestures, which lets you do things like swipe left to take a call or swipe up to raise the volume. Thus it can turn any car into a futuristic smart car.

The Exploride set costs US$299 to pre-order on Indiegogo, which has got the interest of people from all over the world. The early bird offer of US$239 for the first 100 claimants was sold out in no time.

Kerala emerging as a hub for hardware startups

“Crowdfunding was a great way to identify our customers. So far, we have received over 1,800 pre-orders from more than 50 countries,” says Exploride founder Sunil Vallath, whom I first met at the Startup Village in Kerala, south India, where it was incubated. Exploride is now registered in the District of Columbia in the US and is being manufactured in Taiwan. Delivery is expected in January next year.

The success of Exploride will encourage other consumer-oriented hardware startups to take the crowdfunding route and get global customers from the outset.

SectorQube’s smart microwave oven MAID, and RHL Vision’s wearable ring FIN, which can turn your palm into a numeric keypad, are two other Startup Village incubatees that reached their crowdfunding goals.

And just last week we wrote about Cannybots, the smart toys which teach kids programming even as they have fun racing the robocars. It crossed its Kickstarter target in just two hours. Cannybots is a UK-based startup but its founder Anish Mampetta is from Kerala, where he did his engineering studies.