‘French revolution’ in Shenzhen as Cyril Ebersweiler’s HAX helps start-ups speed products to market
A ‘French revolution’ is going on in Shenzhen, thanks to Cyril Ebersweiler and his company, HAX, which helps start-up businesses speed products to market. He spoke to ZEN SOO
Speak to any hardware start-up business in Shenzhen and the chances are they will have heard of Cyril Ebersweiler. The Frenchman, 36, founded HAX there in 2011. The “hardware accelerator” speeds up business ideas, such as 3D printers or consumer product devices, for about 30 start-up companies a year. HAX provides guidance and expertise from start to finish – when a product goes on sale – and funding of up to US$300,000 in return for equity in the business. Ebersweiler is seen as a pioneer in the “lean hardware” movement, which has helped to revolutionise the way hardware products are made.
How do you pick start-up firms?
We choose strong teams with prototypes already in place – hopefully they’re doing something hard and have a market for their product. Most start-ups in the programme are focused on business-to-consumer hardware, and about 40 per cent are business-to-business products, such as machines in particular.
We need tools, so we also tend to gravitate towards hardware start-ups that deal with rapid-prototyping. One company that joined HAX, Voltera, built a device that 3D-prints electronic circuit boards. As a hardware accelerator it makes sense to help build these things; these tools might be used by the next generation of hardware founders.
What exactly is ‘lean hardware’?
We’ve spearheaded the “lean hardware” movement – recreated the way products are built by blending the prototyping phase and manufacturing phase as much as possible. The goal is to reduce time to market; start-ups that don’t have any revenue are essentially just burning money.
