Perth and San Francisco, Australia, June 5, 2016 – Nuheara, an innovative audio Wearables company co-located in Perth, Australia and San Francisco, USA, announced today that its pre-order campaign for IQbuds™ on the Indiegogo platform exceeded A$1,000,000 in revenue.
Nuheara is developing intelligent wireless earbuds that aim to allow users to hear what they want to hear in the world around them and in their digital world. Nuheara describes IQbuds™ as a cross between an Assistive Listening device, Noise Cancelling headset and a Bluetooth headphones, all in two totally wireless earbuds.
“The preorder campaign was designed to reward our early supporters with access to our first commercially available product IQbuds™, expected to commence shipping in December 2016,” said Nuheara CEO, Justin Miller.
According to Evan Cohen, Senior Director of Design, Technology and Hardware at Indiegogo, “The Nuheara IQbuds™ campaign had an amazing start. Hitting your funding target in the first two hours is no easy feat, and the traction they’ve received so far is truly impressive. This is certainly one of the leading campaigns on our platform this year to date.”
It’s been a big few months for Nuheara as it raised A$3.5M in a public offering on the Australia Stock Exchange on March 2nd this year and had been trading at well above its listing price since then.
According to Miller, “We were really pleased with the response from the market to the Nuheara public offering last month. Nuheara is the only consumer wearables company listed on the ASX, and this pre-order campaign represents the execution of the first stage go-to-market with IQbuds™.”
“We initially planned on using it to evaluate product market fit, provide consumer research and create an effective marketing platform on which to build the Nuheara IQbuds™ brand. We are very encouraged by this response to the IQbuds™ value proposition from over 3300 customers placing pre-orders from 80 countries,” said Miller.
According to David Cannington, who has driven the pre-order initiative from Nuheara’s North American base in San Francisco, “These early stage results are very encouraging from a revenue perspective. It is also interesting that while most of the initial sales traction has stemmed predominantly from pre-orders within USA, Australia, Canada and the UK, we have so far received contributions from over 80 different countries. It helps reaffirm that we have a global opportunity to solve problems for customers everywhere.”
IQbuds™ is the first product for Nuheara and according to the company, hundreds of consumers have responded very positively to the working wearable prototypes that they have been testing over the last two months in Australia and USA.
Nuheara has developed a contractual Research and Development relationship with Curtin University in Perth, where Nuheara funds post-doctoral researchers at the University, who specialize in digital signal processing and augmented hearing.
“Curtin University provides an added level of robustness to our global business and product aspirations. In that sense, we are proud to be a poster child for Universities and the private sector collaborating to build innovative technology products for the global market ” said Miller.
While all the technology development is happening in Perth, Nuheara was born global and it has a partnership with one of the world’s leading Wearables incubators, Wearable World IoT Labs in San Francisco. “It’s a huge advantage for Nuheara to have a base in the heart of the weareables eco-system in Silicon Valley. We are creating a go-to-market channel for all the great technology being developed by our team in Perth.” said Cannington.
Nuheara has been working on its intelligent earbuds (IQbuds™) for over 18 months and plans to commence shipping to its early supporters in December 2016.
