Yonatan Raz-Fridman and Alex Klein, Kano

Yonatan Raz-Fridman and Alex Klein, 31 and 25
Company: Kano
Web: www.kano.me

Founding duo Yonatan Raz-Fridman (above, right) and Alex Klein (above, left) featured in our five to watch last year before Kano had even began shipping its main product – a do-it-yourself computer building kit for children – because of its impressive market introduction. The start-up had raised $1.5m on Kickstarter (and remains the most crowdfunded learning invention ever) and had a pre-order list of 13,000 customers, which included Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and spanned across 80 countries.

Using Raspberry Pi’s single-board computer as a base, Kano’s core kit contains add-on hardware that can be built onto the board as easily as Lego. The innovative start-up has also developed a fun open-source OS which lets users “invent something new” as well as a range of illustrated books of computer projects and stories.

Across the last 12 months, Kano has seen huge growth, selling over 40,000 kits and doubling its team size to 40. The company also recently raised a whopping $15m Series A round led by Breyer Capital, and plans to use the funding to continue on its mission to “revive the personal computer for a new generation” – with a new Kano and other computer software products in the pipeline…