Pre-order update
November 2015
eero supporters,
Waiting sucks. Especially when it’s for a product that promises to fix your home WiFi problems once and for all. For all our supporters who put faith in us so early, we know it’s been a long wait.
If we had less stringent standards, we’d be able to get the product out the door and into your homes this month. But we don’t want to deliver a beta product. We want to deliver the future of home WiFi. This means that unfortunately our ship date is going to be early 2016. All pre-orders will ship no later than February. We’re truly sorry for having set expectations that we would ship this past summer only to push out our ship date.
There are two main reasons for the delay. One, it’s very challenging to scale manufacturing for a brand new product with high pre-order demand and not sacrifice quality. eero is designed to have fit and finish deserving of being placed anywhere in your home, and as a result, we take quality very seriously. We reject blemishes on our plastic parts smaller than the thickness of a human hair, and use automated optical inspection to precisely measure alignment and check the fit of the assembly. Every unit undergoes more than 225 separate tests to ensure that when you power on your eero, it works exactly like it’s supposed to, straight out of the box.
The second reason relates to the fact that homes come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They are almost as diverse and unique as people. The variance in layout, furniture, and the types of Internet-enabled devices in our homes means there are lots of corner cases to test and debug. This is why we’ve launched a large, nationwide beta. We’re working overtime to ensure that eero can be the solution for every home.
We don’t want to make excuses. Setting a timeline for developing eero was more art than science. Like other hardware companies, we made our best guess, but were ultimately too aggressive. We’ve gotten used to waiting for fancy new phones and cars, but as a young company, we didn’t want to make our customers wait for eero.
For those of you who cannot wait any longer, we completely understand. As always, just email us at help@eero.com and we’ll refund your order, no questions asked.
Now, for some good news:
We’re FCC-approved!
We’ve been officially approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to sell and ship eero in the United States. The FCC regulates all wireless equipment and sets standards for how wireless devices must behave. Passing FCC testing requires rigorous engineering validation and production-ready hardware. This was a huge milestone for our team and clears the way for us to begin manufacturing at scale.
We’re backed by some of the best VCs in hardware
In addition to the trust and investment you’ve placed in us, we’ve now raised over $40M in capital. Shasta Ventures, an early backer of Nest, and Redpoint Ventures, an investor in Sonos, have joined existing investor First Round Capital. Rob Coneybeer from Shasta and Satish Dharmaraj from Redpoint have joined Rob Hayes on our Board of Directors. We’re also thrilled to announce funding from Andy Rubin’s Playground. Andy co-founded Android and built it into the world’s largest smartphone ecosystem while at Google.
This financing has allowed us to build a world-class team of over 50 in software, hardware, design, marketing, manufacturing, and business operations. It’s also made it possible for us to begin to ramp production and create a support infrastructure that will last into the future.
Your early support has been critical. You saw the vision of a future where WiFi is as reliable as electricity. Where instead of being a source of frustration, it enables your technology and home. And you saw a scrappy team with a big mission and backed us. We’re sorry for the delay, and can’t wait to ship a great product.
Thanks again for your continued support,
-Nick
