Misfit Wearables, the hardware startup that built a sleek activity tracker called the Shine, just picked up $15.2 million from Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures in a big, new growth round.
Jason Wong, a director at the Hong Kong-based firm, will be joining the board. Misfit added that all of its existing investors, including Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Paypal co-founder Max Levchin and incTANK all participated and took their full pro-rata in the round.
Misfit was co-founded by former Apple CEO John Sculley along with Sonny Vu and Sridhar Iyengar, who were behind the medical devices company that had the first Apple blessed add-on for the iPhone, which was a glucose meter.
Misfit launched the Shine earlier this year; it’s a quarter-sized activity tracker that awards users points for walking, running and swimming among other activities. Unlike other wrist-bound activity trackers, the Shine can be worn anywhere — as a clip-on to your shoes or your shirt, or as a necklace. That form factor has made it surprisingly popular among female consumers, we’ve heard from sources close to the company.
Like competing products such as the Jawbone, the Shine pairs itself with a mobile app that shows day-by-day graphs of activity. It has a cool syncing behavior, where you place the Shine on top of your smartphone and little circles radiate outward from the device until your phone downloads the data it contains.
The company hasn’t shared detailed statistics on sales so far except to say that that they’ve shipped “hundreds of thousands” of units to more than 20 countries in the last few months.
They’ve also scored key distribution deals with retailers like Apple, Best Buy and Target, which will help on top of online sales through their website.
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The funding is going toward new, yet-to-be-launched products that should come out next year. CEO Sonny Vu says that the Shine was merely a starting product and that they have a number of other wearable concepts in the works.
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