Eric Migicovsky

Eric Migicovsky is a Canadian engineer and hardware maker best known as the creator of the Pebble smartwatch, which was the most-funded project in Kickstarter's history when it launched in 2012. In 2025 he started Core Devices, a small self-funded company that brought Pebble back to life.

Born in Vancouver in 1986, Migicovsky studied systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo, graduating in 2009. The idea for a smartwatch came during a 2008 exchange term at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, where he wanted to read messages without pulling out his phone while cycling. His first attempt, the inPulse watch for BlackBerry, shipped in 2010.

The Pebble Kickstarter opened on April 11, 2012 with a $100,000 goal and closed on May 18 with $10,266,845 pledged. The Pebble Time campaign in 2015 raised $20,338,986, and Pebble 2 collected $12.8 million in 2016. Pebble's e-paper watches with week-long battery life sold more than two million units, but the company could not compete with Apple and Fitbit at scale. It filed for insolvency in December 2016 and sold most of its assets to Fitbit.

Afterwards Migicovsky spent time at Y Combinator and co-founded Beeper, a chat app that combines many messaging networks in one inbox; Automattic bought Beeper in April 2024. At his request Google, which had acquired Fitbit, open-sourced PebbleOS in January 2025. He then founded Core Devices, unveiled the Core 2 Duo and Core Time 2 in March 2025, won back the Pebble trademark in July 2025 and renamed them Pebble 2 Duo and Pebble Time 2. At CES 2026 he showed the Pebble Round 2, and the company also took preorders for the Index 01, an AI smart ring.

The second time around he is deliberately small. TechCrunch reported in January 2026 that Core Devices had five people and no outside funding, with about 25,000 watch preorders and roughly 5,000 ring preorders, and Migicovsky describes it as a sustainable, profitable business rather than a startup. That makes him one of the clearest examples of a hardware founder who went from venture-backed scale to an indie-sized company by choice.