Our Investment in Pi Charging

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Venture Capital 2016 has made its initial Series A investment in Pi Charging, Inc. Pi delivers wireless power to multiple devices safely and at high power (up to 10W) from any angle without requiring a charging mat. They achieve this magic using their proprietary breakthrough: the world’s first magnetic field-shaping algorithm.

Pi was founded by Lixin Shi and John McDonald, who met at MIT. Their vision was to change the state-of-the-art in wireless charging, not with charging pads, microwaves, lasers, or ultrasound, but with a long-range magnetic charging transmitter. These transmitters will work with the Qi wireless standard, so your new iPhone 8, iPhone X, and many other current and future devices are compatible, and won’t require a special case.

Pi sits in our HCI Theme (they pitched themselves as “The Glue to our HCI”) and fits in nicely with the other hardware companies in the portfolio: Chowbotics, Fitbit, June, littleBits, Nima, Glowforge, Formlabs, Modular Robotics, Looking Glass, Oblong, Occipital, ROLI, Sphero, and TrackR.

We were originally connected to Pi by Jeff Clavier, Founder and Managing Partner at Uncork Capital (fka SoftTech VC). As we spent more time with John and Lixin, we found them to be awesome humans, and their vision, product, and tech chops meant we wanted to get involved with Pi.

While wireless charging is still in its infancy, consumers are starting to expect it in new products, and we are excited to partner with this incredible team to create the future of charging.

Check out picharging.com to see what’s under the hood, and reserve your own Pi here. It’s also worth watching Pi’s Winning Presentation at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017. TechCrunch ran the story today about this financing.