Limor Fried

Limor Fried, known online as ladyada, is an American electrical engineer best known as the founder of Adafruit Industries, the New York company that designs, makes and sells open-source electronics kits, boards and tools for hobbyists and learners. She is one of the central figures of the open-source hardware movement.

Fried grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, and studied at MIT, earning a B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science in 2003 and an M.Eng. in 2005. Her master's project, Social Defense Mechanisms, included glasses that darken when a television comes into view. She began selling electronics kits from her MIT dorm room, and in 2005 that side project became Adafruit, which later moved to New York City.

Adafruit grew without outside investors. In 2010 it had eight employees and shipped more than $3 million of products; Wikipedia, citing press reports, lists revenue of $22 million in 2013, $33 million in 2014 and $45 million in 2016, when it had 105 employees. The company is known for the Feather board family, for CircuitPython, for its detailed free tutorials and for weekly live shows such as Ask an Engineer and Show-and-Tell, hosted with her husband and Adafruit collaborator Phillip Torrone.

She helped draft the Open Source Hardware definition, and her recognition is long: the EFF Pioneer Award in 2009, the first female engineer on the cover of Wired, Entrepreneur magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year in 2012, a White House Champion of Change for Making in 2015, Forbes' Top 50 Women in Tech in 2018, a GitHub Hardware Hacker award in 2023 and a place on Forbes' 250 America's Greatest Innovators in 2026.

For indie makers she is proof that a founder-owned, engineering-led hardware company can reach tens of millions in revenue by teaching its customers, publishing its designs and keeping control of its own manufacturing in New York.