Top Hardware Startups in North America

Volta Labs was spun out of MIT in 2018 with the simple mission of building biological automation from the ground up. Volta is in the proximity of Kendall Square, known as "the most innovative square mile on the planet". Being part of the open biotech culture in Kendall Square made us realize that today’s biologists are held back by the limitations of existing automation tools. With DNA sequencing in particular, we observed that the advances in DNA readout technologies had moved further along than the advances in the upstream steps of preparing samples for sequencing (sample prep). ‍ What started out as a simple printed circuit board to manipulate colored droplets at the MIT Media Lab during co-founder Udayan Umapathi’s graduate work was quickly directed toward solving the “sample prep bottleneck”. The company raised Seed Funding from top VCs in 2019 and later that year added Will Langford as a co-founder and Head of Engineering. ‍ Since then, we have been heads down in the lab inventing and building novel fluidic and sample manipulation technologies. We take an anti-disciplinary approach to solve very hard problems and weave together instrumentation, fluidics, software, biology and chemistry. While our current focus is on sequencing sample prep, we envision a new approach where a single universal machine automates most biological workflows in genomics, proteomics and synthetic biology.

Unity is the world’s leading platform for creating and operating real-time 3D (RT3D) content. Creators, ranging from game developers to artists, architects, automotive designers, filmmakers, and others, use Unity to make their imaginations come to life. Unity’s platform provides a comprehensive set of software solutions to create, run and monetize interactive, real-time 2D and 3D content for mobile phones, tablets, PCs, consoles, and augmented and virtual reality devices. The company’s 1,400+ person research and development team keeps Unity at the forefront of development by working alongside partners to ensure optimized support for the latest releases and platforms. Apps developed by Unity creators were downloaded more than three billion times per month in 2019 on more than two billion unique devices. For more information, please visit unity.com. Download Unity: unity3d.com/get-unity We're hiring! Visit our careers site: careers.unity.com For support, please email: [email protected] Check us out on our other social channels: Twitter: twitter.com/unity3d Facebook: facebook.com/unity3d LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/unity-technologies Instagram: instagram.com/unitytechnologies

Recent Awards / Mentions: - Apple's Top 10 Apps in the World - Business Insider's most innovative companies in the world along with Uber and Snapchat: At Lark, we’re on a mission to improve people’s health and happiness through our digital health coach AI which has become the first A.I. nurse to be reimbursed as a live healthcare professional. Our app takes data from phones and wearables, and uses it to create a personalized health "chat bot" buddy that sticks with users and helps them stay active, sleep more, and eat healthy. We are using NLP to process millions of meals, and accelerometer data to compute activity and sleep amounts from users' phones. Our chat AI is the most sophisticated digital health engagement tool in the world. Join us and make it even better!

PAX Labs is an award-winning consumer technology brand with a mission to establish cannabis as a force for good. Our products set a high bar for quality and, together with the PAX App, offer unique features such as safety locking, adjustable temperature and draw control. As millions of consumers try cannabis for the first time or return to it after a long hiatus, PAX believes that quality, transparency and predictability are the keys to safe, responsible use by adults. Headquartered in San Francisco, PAX is backed by leading technology investors including Tiger Global and Tao Invest (Pritzker family fund). We are an exceptional team with hardware and software backgrounds in consumer technology, healthcare, and biotech, and are growing rapidly to deliver on our mission. Our internal culture values diversity, integrity, having an impact, and passion for the larger movement that PAX is a part of.

Revivn is a fully integrated hardware lifecycle solution, promoting global responsibility while providing IT with enterprise-class service and security. Working with companies like Instacart, Lyft & Teach for America we are changing the way companies view old technology with a new model that focuses on repurposing electronics. In partnering with Revivn, companies make the vital choice to manage the hardware lifecycle responsibly and consciously — and we’re here to support them every step of the way. This mission and commitment extends to serving our customers worldwide, supporting communities and organizations in need, and cultivating a culture that inspires our employees to find purpose in their work.

HootBoard is a leading visitor information and wayfinding kiosk platform. It is designed to help smart cities, tourism departments, and universities create a more engaging and informative experience for their visitors. Also, it includes advanced Digital Out-of-Home(DOOH) advertising features that help media companies expand their advertising reach to locations where traditional OOH media is not allowed. At HootBoard, we believe that the future of visitor information and advertising lies in the integration of technology and convenience. Our platform offers an easy-to-use interface that provides visitors with relevant and timely information, including maps, directions, and event schedules. Also, we help organizations generate additional revenue streams and maximize their inventory. They can sell ads directly, collaborate with our DOOH partner network, or use our programmatic advertising integrations. By investing in our kiosk platform, organizations can expect a return on investment in less than three years. Whether you're a tourism department looking to improve your visitor experience, a smart city seeking to enhance wayfinding and advertising, or a university looking to streamline campus navigation, HootBoard has the solution you need. Contact us today to learn more about how our platform can benefit your organization.

Ayar Labs helps companies keep up with skyrocketing volumes of data by offering a breakthrough hardware that brings the super-high bandwidths and low energy use of fiber optics inside computers. We are on a mission to get optics inside all electronics, replacing electricity with light, and bringing breakthrough improvements in performance and energy efficiency to computing. We are commercializing a breakthrough technology from MIT, UC Berkeley, and CU Boulder in which we have figured out how to get silicon chips, such as processors, memory, and ASICs, to communicate with light instead of electricity using established CMOS fabrication processes with no process changes. This alternative to copper interconnects brings unprecedented bandwidth and energy efficiency to computing.

Resilient data movement for agentic AI with software, systems and silicon delivering low latency and high bandwidth data network between compute, memory and storage.

StimScience, the company using personalized neuroscience to improve sleep, is the developer of the revolutionary new consumer sleep aid, Somnee. Somnee is the first-ever electronic sleep aid headband to use personalized non-invasive brain stimulation to improve the wearer’s sleep quality. In a 1,500 night home pilot study, Somnee cut the time it took beta users to fall asleep in half, and it reduced the amount of overnight tossing and turning by more than one-third. Learn more and place pre-orders at trysomnee.com.

At Toi Labs, we’re pioneering the next frontier of personal health monitoring—starting in the most unexpected place: the bathroom. By transforming the toilet into a passive health companion, we deliver real-time, actionable insights into gut health and more—without requiring users to change their behavior. Our platform enables early detection and preventive care right from the home. Recognized by TIME as a Best Invention of the Year and backed by TOTO, Sloan and the NIH, we’re combining elegant design, embedded technology, and data science to redefine how—and where—healthcare happens.