Type of business Privately owned Area served Worldwide | Headquarters London, United Kingdom | |
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Founded London, United Kingdom (2014) Founder(s) Soumyadip Rakshit
Shanshan Xu
Rob Weekly
Stephanie Alys Key people Akash Walia
Gabbi Cahane
Alex Cowell
Mark Critchley | ||
MysteryVibe is a British health & lifestyle brand that designs, develops and manufactures luxury pleasure products in the UK. They have been featured in publications such as BBC, Independent, Economist, Times, Glamour, Elle, WSJ, CNBC, The Guardian, FastCompany, TechCrunch, NBC, VentureBeat, Psychologies, Stylist and Evening Standard.
Contents
History
MysteryVibe was founded by a group of researchers, engineers and designers bringing together their experience from Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Sharp, Canon, Philips and Deloitte. Inspired by trends in smartphones like Nokia Morph, the founders came up with the idea of creating a pleasure product that would adapt to any body shape and vibrate to any pattern. They continued to research for a number of years before formally starting the company in May 2014, when they were selected to be incubated by London-based industrial design firm, Seymourpowell.
MysteryVibe released the first version of their app on the Apple App Store in December, 2015 under the Health & Fitness category. The app was downloaded more than 200,000 times since then.
MysteryVibe's flagship product, Crescendo, became the first crowdfunding project to offer its backers 2 versions of their product: Pilot and Retail. They ran what they called the #Pilot1000 programme for their first 1,000 users to get feedback on their Crescendo product. The #Pilot1000 users spanned 48 countries and included both backers and experts. MysteryVibe gave all 1,000 users full access to their founding CEO with direct email, phone and Skype. They then used the feedback they received to make the final Retail Crescendo.
Investment
Due to the inherently lean model adopted by MysteryVibe with collectives and collaborations, they were able to build the company from a sketch to shipped products with less than £1m ($1.5m) in funding. They were also unique in raising 100% of the money from Angel investors without any recourse to Venture Capital, a normal staple in the startup world. MysteryVibe sits within its Angels' diverse portfolio of high-growth startups which include Techstars, Seedcamp, Funding Circle, Collider, F6S, DojoApp, Lystable and Playmob. As of Q2 2016, MysteryVibe has raised $2.4m in total funding.
Virgin #VOOM2016
In June 2016, MysteryVibe became the first pleasure product to be featured by Virgin in their #VOOM competition. They were showcased under the Export Awards category for exporting their UK-manufactured products to over 50 countries worldwide. The same month, they got inducted into the Hardware Club and became the first pleasure product company to be nominated for the 'Best Hardware Startup' award at The Europas in London.
Media attention
MysteryVibe is the first brand in their category to have been featured on BBC. Ranked by top European investors as #9 of the 100 Slush start-ups in Cofounder Magazine, MysteryVibe has also been named as one of the "Top 100 Europe’s hottest early-stage Founders" by PathFounders, Europas. They have also been listed at #7 in the "12 days of start-ups: Spectacular businesses set for stardom in 2016". Since their public launch at TechCrunch Disrupt New York in May 2015 MysteryVibe have been featured in 100+ leading newspapers and magazines across the world. At TechCrunch Disrupt London in December 2015, they were amongst Contagious' top 5 picks from the conference and more recently in Sep 2016, they won the prestigous UK Young Guns award.