SXSW recap: The hardware uprising in Austin
I first attended SXSW back in 2014 when I was working at Quirky. I didn’t get to do much more than work our event that year, but I still remember falling in love with Austin. Ever since then, the conference has been high on my list, but until recently, I struggled to make a business case for it because people kept telling me there’s no hardware there.
We started an Austin Hardware Meetup chapter a little over a year ago, and I’ve gotten to know some of the founders and startups in the community there, particularly how gritty and committed to building hardware they are. It reminds me of San Francisco when I moved back from college in 2010, and New York City in 2012. And there’s a new crop of hardware founders moving to Austin every month! You don’t have to look far to see Austinites calling their Silicon Hills the more physical tech scene.
Last March, we sent our CMO Lindsey Gideon — a native Texan and former Austinite herself — to SXSW to scout things out and assess whether it was worth organizing our own event in 2026. We partnered with a few local hardware companies to host small happy hours and showcases, but Lindsey was mostly just attending and taking notes. She had a great time and met a ton of stellar hardware professionals, but most of all, she saw a huge opportunity to fill the vacuum for hardware events and experiences she saw at the conference. So this year, I flew out and I was shocked at how much hardware I saw there.
My first night in Austin was spent at re:3D’s amazing factory and R&D facility in East Austin. Their founder and CEO Samantha Snabes is a total badass and has built an incredible company that’s pushing the cutting edge of additive manufacturing with printers that recycle plastic as filament. She’s in the Airforce Reserve, previously worked for NASA, and has secured over $50 million in nondilutive capital for her company. Samantha and re:3D are emblematic of what I saw in the Austin community: ambitious, super impressive founders building physical things with or without the help of venture capital.
I met a handful more hardware founders the following morning during the SXSW startup pitch competition. Founders like Connor Crawford of Pike Robotics, another Austin-born hardware startup that recently relocated much of their team to Houston to work from Greentown Labs. Connor was the second of five hardware pitches (out of seven total) I saw over several hours. I was blown away by the number of hardware pitches compared to non-hardware pitches I was seeing — particularly when I heard Blake Dority pitch Boston-based Endox, creators of physical AI for defense.
A defense pitch at SXSW? I thought they very publicly rejected the defense industry, hence competing conferences like Tectonic and Austin 4 America getting their start a few years back. That was the first of many realizations throughout the week that hardware is definitely present at SXSW — you just have to look for it. Like when I attended back-to-back panels at Midwest House on robotics, manufacturing, and how hardware teams can thrive in cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit (shout out to my friend Stacy for bringing me there!).
For our part, we put hardware front and center with our Hardware Garage Party.
Music courtesy of the very excellent all-woman Austin punk band Die Spitz, because you know.
I’m biased, but we threw a killer event. Fictiv has become one of the biggest supporters of Hardware Meetup and events for the hardware community, and they were key to us being able to pull this thing off.
Also key were the dozens of hardware founders that demoed at the event. Connor from Pike and Samantha from re:3D demoed along with:
- Scott Hickel of Throne
- Arjun Gupta of Vyana
- Patrick Paul of Mixfinity
- David Ruth of Motogo
- Uttam Singh of SolarPivotPower
- Arman Sidhu of Basscraft
- James Clark of WYNG
- Mark Shuck of PowerGenX
- Griffin Cherry of PlanetTech
Each of these founders is deep in the trenches building hardware, acquiring customers, and creating inspiring companies in consumer products, power generation, health and wellness, and beyond.
Special thanks to Shawn O’Keefe (the OG of the Austin hardware scene), Alex Kennedy, and Marty Davis for helping me with check-in and “crowd control” (making sure everyone was having a good time).
We’re super stoked about the Austin community in general and for the potential of SXSW to have gravitational force in the hardware ecosystem. We’ll be back with even more in 2027, but in the meantime, keep an eye out for upcoming Austin Hardware Meetup events. We’ll post our Q2 events soon!
informal is a freelance collective for the most talented independent professionals in hardware and hardtech. Whether you’re looking for a single contractor, a full-time employee, or an entire team of professionals to work on everything from product development to go-to-market, informal has the perfect collection of people for the job.