Pebble — The Kickstarter Darling Fitbit Bought to Switch Off

Pebble was the smartwatch that proved the category before the giants arrived to take it — a developer-friendly e-paper watch funded by the most famous crowdfunding campaign of its era — and in December 2016 its founder sold what remained to Fitbit, which kept the talent and the intellectual property and shut the company down. Founded by Eric Migicovsky and routed through Y Combinator, Pebble turned to Kickstarter in 2012 after struggling to raise conventional money, and the result rewrote the platform’s record books: roughly $10.3 million pledged by tens of thousands of backers, the most-funded project in Kickstarter’s history at the time. A 2015 follow-up for the Pebble Time raised about $20.3 million, hitting $1 million in 49 minutes.

The watches were modest by design and beloved for it. A Pebble used a low-power, sunlight-readable e-paper display that ran for days on a charge, paired with iPhone or Android, and threw its doors open to developers — an SDK, an app store, and a hacker-friendly culture that produced thousands of watchfaces and apps. Priced from around $99 to roughly $250, Pebble sold more than two million watches across its models. For a stretch in 2013 and 2014, it was the smartwatch, the proof that wrist computing could work and that an enthusiastic community would build atop it.

Then the platform owners showed up. The Apple Watch arrived in 2015 with Apple’s marketing budget and ecosystem behind it; Fitbit and others pressed in from the fitness side. Pebble, a hardware startup living campaign to campaign, could not match their spend, their distribution, or their balance sheets, and by late 2016 it was running low on cash. On December 6, 2016, Fitbit announced it had acquired Pebble’s software and intellectual property and key personnel — hiring a portion of the staff, reportedly around 40 percent, and laying off the rest. The watches Pebble had not yet shipped were cancelled and refunded; the ones already on wrists would keep working “for now,” with support withdrawn and future functionality, the founder warned, likely to shrink.

The company was gone, but the watches refused to die. A volunteer community called Rebble stood up replacement servers when Pebble’s own cloud services went dark in June 2018, keeping the app store, voice features, and watches alive long past their maker’s death. And in a genuinely rare turn for this catalog, the story bent back toward life: on January 27, 2025, Google open-sourced PebbleOS, releasing the code that had been locked inside a defunct acquisition, and Migicovsky used it to relaunch Pebble hardware. The smartwatch Fitbit switched off became one of the few in this archive to get a second act.