Opal Camera recently announced the completion of its Series A funding round, totalling $17 million. This funding round was led by Founders Fund, with continued participation from Kindred Ventures and other notable investors, including renowned tech creators Marques Brownlee and Casey Neistat.
The company’s first product was the Opal C1 webcam, which is the first professional webcam with DSLR quality. And the product was borne out of an insight that modern workers were spending more time on their webcams than on their phones.
Nearly 60,000 people have been on the waitlist for the C1 after its launch in December 2021, and the camera quickly became a favorite among designers and creators. In the two years since launching, the company has focused on quality, rewriting the camera firmware, and releasing a new software app, the Opal Composer.
With this latest funding round, Opal is broadening its vision to include new cameras, as well as branching into other aspects of consumer electronics. This category has seen little progress over the past decade.
Opal’s expansion into new product lines has centered on the theme that new technologies should not be constrained to old form factors.
Opal’s next products have been built for singular and specific experiences like learning, capturing memories, and having meaningful conversations. And modern tools are built to do everything, but in the process, they miss the nuance and charm of specialized devices that Opal thinks are needed.
Joining Founders Fund in the funding round are Kindred Ventures, Slack Fund, and Sam Hinkie’s Eighty-Seven Capital. And a group of influential hardware storytellers like Marques Brownlee and Casey Neistat joined the round with the founders of Airbnb, Instagram, Shopify, Twitch and YouTube.
Opal recently attracted top talent from industry giants. David Kalinowski, one of the first engineers on Apple Vision Pro, joined Opal to lead hardware. Claudio Guglieri, who recently worked as Design Director at Microsoft, joined to lead design. And Opal also won design awards from AIGA, Red Dot and D&AD, is furthering its design prowess by bringing in celebrated Shinagawa-born industrial designer Akifusa “Aki” Nakazawa, who previously worked in the renowned Sharp Japan design team.
The company has raised $20 million to-date from investors including Will Ahmed, Carmine Arabia, Hugo Barra, Max Branzburg, Leigh Marie Braswell, Joshua Browder, Adam Bry, Jeremy Cai, Oliver Cameron, Ilter Canberk, Liam Casey, Surojit Chatterjee, Emilie Choi, Larry Chu, Soleio Cuervo, Matthew Dellavedova, Charlie & Dixie D’Amelio, Sara Dietschy, Hong Feng, Joe Gebbia, Kevin Gibbon, Ros Gold-Onwude, Manik Gupta, Drew Hanlen, Chad Hurley, Lydia Jett, Mike Krieger, Michelle Kwon, Kirk Lacob, Sahil Lavingia, Kevin Lin, Tobias Lütke, Charley Ma, Trevor McFedries, Matt Mullenweg, Zaza Pachulia, Carl Pei, Ryan Petersen, Anthony Pompliano, Gokul Rajaram, Karri Saarinen, Tim Young, Ed Zitron, 444 Capital, Acrew Capital, Automattic, Coalition Operators, Cherubic Ventures, Seven Seven Six, Shrug Capital, and WSGR.
KEY QUOTES:
“We founded Opal under a simple principle – that the products you use the most often should be the best things you own.”
“The honest truth is that we started Opal because we thought the market for webcams desperately needed better hardware. What we realized is that you can bring a lot of people joy by giving them usable, beautiful devices.”
“Phones were perfect for helping us take the internet anywhere. But now we’re at the tipping point of a lot of new technologies, where our relationship with devices and information is going to change in meaningful ways.”
— Veeraj Chugh, CEO and co-founder of Opal
“This funding allows us to grow both the short and long-term visions of Opal. We’re excited to further grow our camera business, but we’re also posing ourselves a fundamental question: what does a modern consumer electronics company look like, and what would it build?”
“We want Opal to build these new devices that give us an intimate way to use modern technologies. Sony did something similar in the 1980’s, building new devices that changed our lives. They started with humble transistor radios, and we started with webcams.”
— Stefan Sohlstrom, co-founder of Opal
“Sometimes you walk into an office, and on the tables you see stuff that looks like the future. The hard part is turning it into something real. I think Opal knows how. And they’re about to show you.”
— Trae Stephens – who was the partner who led the investment for Founders Fund
