Tencent business news According to foreign media reports, Kano, a startup that guides children in learning computers and programming, offers a variety of DIY hardware development kits this week and announced that it has completed a $ 28 million round of financing.
Kano plans to use the money to boost North American sales during the holiday season this year, including deploying products to 4,500 stores and developing new computing and consumer technologies for future products, including Camera, helping users learn artificial intelligence techniques, as well as virtual reality and augmented reality.
Kano has made a strong momentum since its inception, and since the first product was launched in September 2014, there are currently 141,000 Kano devices connected to its network. Amateur developers in 86 countries have developed these devices About 22.7 million applications, the youngest developer is only 6. Kano said that users in the 30 days to participate in the Kano community, the average time of 13.5 hours, similar to Snapchat.
At present, Kano hopes to increase the number of users by expanding the retail network.If you want to buy Kano's $ 249 DIY tool, you can go to North America's Best Buy and Tajit, part of Wal-Mart stores, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indigo, Microsoft, The Source, as well as Toys R Us.
Kano hopes to 'decrypt' computing experiences and at the same time allow people to think more about how technology in life comes in. As computing becomes a seamless part of our everyday lives, it's getting harder to achieve that goal. Kano's approach runs counter to the relationship between user and technology today, as well as many other tech companies.
Alex Klein, CEO of Kano, said: 'We have not been trying anything here for decades, and we are building an end-to-end computer company.' He described Kano's mission statement 80% of the software and 20% of the hardware.
This round of financing is Kano's Series B round of financing led by Thames Trust and Breyer Capital, Index Ventures, Stanford Engineering Ventures and LocalGlobe. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff also participated in this round This led Kano to raise a total of $ 45 million in funding, and Kline said Kano will not disclose the value of the round of financing, but the valuation has risen from the previous level.
Kano also faces several competitors, for example, developing a conversational style earlier this week robot Wo to help children learn computer and programming nder Workshop announced the completion of 41 million US dollars in financing.