Pebble founder says his new company is ‘not a startup’

Summary

Pebble’s founder, Eric Migicovsky, is doing things differently with his reboot of the Pebble smartwatch brand and an AI ring. The team is small, inventory isn’t being manufactured before it’s sold, and there’s no outside funding. Most importantly, he says, the new company, Core Devices, is “not a startup.” “We’ve structured this entire business around being a sustainable, profitable, and hopefully, long-running enterprise, but not a startup,” Migicovsky told TechCrunch on the sidelines of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. “Startups are good for the world,” he clarified. “You need to have money in order to build really new ideas and create something. But this is not a new idea,” Migicovsky said, referring to the smartwatch reboot. “This is an old idea. We’re just bringing it back.” The Pebble founder said he’s learned a lot from his earlier efforts at building a hardware device maker, including what not to do. Pebble, the original company that Migicovsky started, was sold to Fitbit in 2016 for around $40 million; Fitbit was later acquired by Google for $2.1 billion. Just before its exit, Migicovsky’s team had been scrambling. Christmas 2015 had put Pebble into a tailspin, as the company had bought too much inventory. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 “Hardware is different from software. You have to predict ahead of time how much you’re going to sell, because you need to build the hardware,” Migicovsky explained, reminiscing on the time when things went wrong. Pebble’s team then had estimated they would do $102 million in sales that year, but they did “only” $82 million. While that number is impressive for a smartwatch brand (particularly one that’s not Apple, Google, or Samsung), the company was left with unsold inventory that had to be sold at a discount. Retail partners were also upset because discounted sales meant reduced margins. Meanwhile, Pebble didn’t have enough money to finish developing its new products. To make ends...