The new round values the five-year-old company at $1.3 billion (€1.2 billion), giving it room to tinker with new device categories that lean on artificial intelligence.
Nothing chief executive and founder Carl Pei claimed the company raked in $500 million (€465 million) in sales last year, up 150 per cent from the year before, with seven million devices shifted so far. He reckons revenues should hit $1 billion (€930 million) this year.
Pei told the Financial Times: “The reason why I think this fundraising was successful is because of the hardcore numbers that we’re able to deliver in terms of growth.”
The company has built a cult following with its quirky hardware design and friendlier price tags compared with Job’s Mob and Samsung. Its design team is parked in London, but manufacturing is handled in China and India.
Despite the hype, the sales numbers are still small fry. Market watcher Omdia said global smartphone shipments rose seven per cent last year to 1.22 billion, leaving Nothing out of the top ten.
Pei insists that does not matter. “There are a lot of consumer [hardware] start-ups out there but very few that have delivered these kind of numbers,” he said.
“There’s a group of people out there who don’t want to be like everybody else,” Pei added.
The new cash is led by Tiger Global, the New York investor best known for punting on Alibaba and Facebook. Qualcomm Ventures, the chipmaker’s investment arm, and Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath are also on board.
Existing backers include Tony Fadell, the former Job’s Mob designer who created Nest, Reddit boss Steve Huffman, and Alphabet’s venture arm GV alongside Highland Europe, Latitude and Tapestry.
Tapestry investor, Patrick Murphy said Nothing was in a “David versus Goliath” battle but argued its “aesthetic and brand positioning and ability to have the best features at half the price of Apple, without sacrificing the design and the user experience is really resonating.”
Pei has bigger dreams than flogging smartphones. He is eyeing robotics and a future where his software runs inside electric cars.
His next bet is so-called “AI native” gadgets, the same vague category being cooked up by Jony Ive after OpenAI bought his company io for $6.4 billion (€5.95 billion) in May.
“As we interact more with AI, we’re going to come to understand that the more data and context we can feed it, the more useful it will become to us . . . and that will trigger the rise of a new category of devices,” Pei said.
“Now, what is the form factor going to be? I don’t think anybody knows.”