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VC Intelligence Report

Littlebits

Hardware — Littlebits provides modular hardware components that connect magnetically to create interactive …
Hardwarehardware-salesest. 2013
▲ Rising
Category standing real
67th pctl · Hardware
22.9
Signal score
0–100 composite · real
#1,153
Category rank
of 5,243 · real
53th
Universe percentile
vs 79,105 modeled · real
45%
Mortality P(dead)
model est. · model est.

Signal trajectory

real

Signal 9.613.2 across 24 readings (+3.6). Composite of press, GitHub velocity, community heat, liveness and funding.

Cross-sectional profile

percentile rank vs 79,105 modeled products
Signal (universe) real
53
Signal (category) real
67
Profile maturity real
53
Tag breadth real
64
Network position sparse
94
Press footprint sparse
0

Percentiles computed over the modeled cohort (embedding + signal + tags). Sparse dimensions — network and press — reflect that most products have zero, so a single edge or mention lifts the rank; read those with the coverage flag.

Mortality outlook

model estimate
45%
P(inactive)
Moderate risk
Higher risk than 43% of the universe.

This is a model estimate, not a verdict. 78,505 of the 79,105 modeled products are unlabeled and scored by the model only.

  • LightGBM · binary mortality (dead vs surviving)
  • Held-out AUC 0.71 · CV AUC 0.79 ± 0.05 · Brier 0.21
  • Trained on 600 verified labels (150 dead / 450 surviving)
  • Leakage-guarded: excludes status, discontinued_year, profile_maturity
  • Top drivers: tag breadth, signal, vintage, liveness, business model

n=600 is thin → 95% CI on AUC ≈ ±0.10. Treat as a directional signal, not a calibrated probability.

Analyst read

generated from the metrics above · no external narrative

Littlebits sits in the 53th percentile of Launch Sentinel's 79,105-product universe by signal, ranked #1,153 of 5,243 in Hardware. The mortality model puts its probability of going inactive at 45% — a model estimate with a wide confidence band. It sits on the competitive-alternatives graph with 1 linked rival, so the comparable set below leans on curated edges. Signal momentum is positive (WoW +37.1).

Comparable set

curated alternatives → functional tag-similarity
CompanyBasisSignalP(dead)
Kano Computer Kithardwaresimilar15.718%
Antbohardwaresimilar22.977%
Osmoeducationtag-overlap15.729%
NanoBlockTime Traveler Watchhardwaresimilar30.066%
gTar Smart Guitareducationtag-overlap18.682%
Robopaleducationtag-overlap22.972%
Papier Machineeducationtag-overlap25.71%
DRUMKIT by Obilabhardwaresimilar15.748%

Confidence reflects source and category coherence: curated = an editorially linked alternative; similar = strong functional tag-overlap in the same category; tag-overlap = shared tags only and may be noisy. Signal & P(dead) are real / model.

Structure

observed attributes
Business modelhardware-sales
Liveness tierunknown
Open sourceNo
Public APINo
Free tierNo
Enterprise tierNo

Funding & team

not in source

No disclosed funding in our sources. Funding data covers only ~1% of the corpus (462 rounds across 79K products), so absence here is unknown, not zero— we don't estimate a number we can't source.