2025 is a wrap! Hello 2026 👋
Happy New Year everybody! 2025 was a wild ride, mostly in a good way. Tariffs, trade wars, and persistent inflation made the macro situation more challenging for hardware companies, but through it all, one very bright spot was crystal clear: hardware is hot right now.
And it should be! In a lot of ways, AI is the end state for digital products and digital innovation because if you can automate and delegate all digital tasks to AI agents, what’s left to build in software? Couple that with the growing realization that manufacturing capacity = sovereignty and that innovation in our physical world needs to catch up to the digital one, and you have the perfect storm for a new Hardware Renaissance. But unlike 2012–2016, this renaissance is defined not by consumer products (unless they involve AI, but I digress), but by electrification and robotics.
We started the year with robot fever and there are no signs of it breaking.
The informal community has a front row seat to this transition, and we’ve been fortunate to work with some of the early pioneers in this new frontier of hardware and manufacturing, both as clients and as members of the collective. Here’s a look at the last year for informal and the hardware community more broadly.
informal by the numbers 📈
We slowed recruiting to prioritize adding people who our members, clients, and partners already know and trust. Roughly 300 people applied to join the network, and we added 109 new members. Our greatest amount of growth was in the San Francisco Bay Area, where hardware hotness is particularly scorching because of the AI boom.
A rough distribution of informal members by roles. Lots of exceptional MEs in this bunch.
We had 105 informal members log over 20k hours working with 130 hardware companies across 20 different industries ranging from product development firms to grid-scale battery companies. They earned over $3.3 million for their efforts.
Among the 275 projects informal members engaged in, 10% were in robotics and 20% involved some embodied AI. We continued to support the hardware agency community with super fast talent matching, accounting for another 10% of our projects this year.
For many of the agencies we work with, we set up co-branded landing pages.
informal clients in the news 📰
There’s so much filling the news cycle these days that breaking into the narrative has gotten more difficult than ever. As much as Sam and I grumble about the times we live in (can’t we just have precedented times for once?), the upshot to a frothy media environment is that companies that can break out are usually some of the best and most innovative.
We’re honored to have multiple clients on this list again this year.
Unsurprisingly, our most mature clients made the biggest waves. Eight Sleep announced raising a whopping $100 million in August to expand their AI sleep tech ambitions. Form Energy was also in the news for the new state-of-the-art battery production facility they opened in West Virginia. But many startups we work with were also able to break through the noise in 2025. Pila Energy launched their mesh home battery system at SXSW and Austin-based Throne Science got a great writeup in TechCrunch. Throne was also featured in Time Magazine’s Best Innovations of 2025 list, alongside clients Voltpost and Shinkei Systems.
Building hardware can be very fun and funny too, as Sam Holland can tell you.
Honorable mention, of course, goes to my better half’s launch of Donut Hole’der in the spring with a hilarious campaign to get Dunkin Donuts’ attention. It went viral and led to Sam being featured on a couple of podcasts. It also inspired us to bring back Burrito Pop (more on that in a future post).
informal platform 🧑💻
This year, we focused on platform improvements and implementing ways to help our team move faster, while setting the stage for us to grow our internal team in 2026. Sam made much needed quality-of-life improvements to our platform front end and modularized our backend to make it easier to maintain, expand, and interoperate with new third party tools. These have allowed us to do much more with less people, enabling a team of three (me, Sam, and we recently made Lindsey full time) to manage hundreds of different clients, members, and projects simultaneously.
A fresh coat of UI paint can make all the difference.
On the automations front, we still see lots of potential with AI in the loop of our matchmaking and quality control processes, but so far, the machines aren’t taking out jobs any time soon. Only 15% of matches this year were directly attributable to matches surfaced by our AI. The remaining 85% were from our team, their relationships with our 600 members, and a well-organized and easy-to-search database.
informal content 📥
Where last year we found our voice, in 2025 we amplified it, and we used our platform to amplify other voices in the hardware community:
- Our good friend Brogan Miller went to Vietnam to answer the question “is Vietnam the next China?”
- Vanessa Julia Carpenter wrote about opportunities in Femtech
- Lisa Voronkova about the challenge with medical devices
- Shimra Fine wrote a bunch of pieces on soft goods
- Sam Feller wrote about building hardware project schedules
- And many, many more
Featuring new and unique voices was a priority in 2025.
In addition to our many teardowns and guides for people getting started in hardware, we started writing more about informal itself: how we started, why we call ourselves a collective, and our (strong) opinions on how to price and bill for work (to name a few). This is all part of pulling back the curtain on what makes informal informal, and what someone can expect from working with us.
We connect the dots with free tools and resources.
Speaking of working with us, we also launched a bunch of free tools and resources we use a lot internally to help other hardware professionals and teams move faster and be more effective. If you’d like to contribute to the informal blog, newsletter, or growing library of free tools and resources, email hello@informal.cc. We’d love to hear from you!
informal events 🌆
Hardware Meetups continued to grow around the world, with 30 new chapters starting in 2025, from Boise to Singapore. People all over the world are looking for their hardware community, and they’re finding them at Hardware Meetup. There are now over 40k people attending Hardware Meetups in their cities every month.
Hardware Meetup has a Substack!
We launched a global newsletter this year to help everyone keep track of what’s going on at Hardware Meetups around the world. If you want to stay up to date with the latest happenings in the hardware community, be sure to join the over 12k subscribers that receive our monthly roundups right in their inbox.
We wrapped up 2025 with a rooftop party in LA courtesy of informal member Bob Brakeman.
The year wrapped up with a whopping four Hardware Holiday parties in SF, NYC, Boston, and LA. They were a fantastic way to end 2025 and celebrate an incredible year for people working in hardware. A huge thank you to all of the 80+ organizers hosting Hardware Meetups for your local communities around the world.
informal spaces 🏭
Studio 45 continues to be a hub for the hardware community in San Francisco, home to an incredible roster of hardware startups like Pila, Skip, and Thunderstone. But it’s not the only space supporting the hardware community in the Bay Area, let alone around the world. Over the years, we’ve noticed that there’s very little cooperation between the various hardware-friendly spaces, which leads to squabbling over the same pie, inflation in the costs of access, and needless competition when we should all be focused on bolstering our shared ecosystem.
We’re building a network of spaces to go with the collective.
Earlier this month, we launched a new initiative called informal spaces to solve exactly this problem for the hardware community. Informal spaces is a network of hardware-friendly spaces, much like the informal collective is a network of talented individuals, with shared access, backend infrastructure, and support services for the teams and professionals building in their spaces. We launched with four spaces including Studio 45, two in Oakland (run by Oakland Hardware Meetup organizer and informal member Kyle Valiton), and one in Mountain View near the Google campus. We also recently launched a hardware investing syndicate to help drive more capital into the ecosystem, and monthly pitch nights at informal spaces.
Throughout 2026, we’ll be partnering with other locations throughout the Bay Area and nationally to bring them into the network and build stronger connective tissue between the very spaces that make the hardware ecosystem tick. If you run a hardware-friendly coworking space or a makerspace that wants to pivot to supporting hardware professionals and teams, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to spaces@informal.com.
Here’s to 2026 🤘
We’re really excited about what’s in store next year both for our community and the hardware ecosystem overall. It truly feels like we’re in the early innings of a new Hardware Renaissance, and I’m stoked to be playing even a small role in it. This year was all about building the foundation for the renaissance, and as far as we’re concerned, none of it would’ve been possible without our members, clients, and community at large. So THANK YOU for everything.
We’ll be celebrating the year ahead at CES again in January, and if you made it this far, we’d love for you to join. We rented the entire Punk Rock Museum and are filling it with hardware demos and some of the most legit people in the industry. You don’t want to miss it!
We have limited space available, so we’re prioritizing hardware professionals (founders, engineers, designers, operators, investors, etc.) for free tickets. When you apply, be sure to include a working link to your LinkedIn and company website so we can easily assess your hardwareness. For everyone else, paid tickets are available and come with a free customized Punk Rock Museum tumbler.
RSVP here before space runs out.
See you in Vegas!