In the spring of 2015, Joshua Montgomery had an idea to voice enable his makerspace. After playing around with several ideas he landed on the first version of Mycroft. This was before Kickstarter, before Techstars; just the regulars at the Lawrence Center for Entrepreneurship. You can read about that here.

The first working prototype was terrible, but the vision was there. From that vision came the desire to prove there was a market for an open source voice assistant. That team at the LCE built the product into a basic working model and took it to the proving ground of all crazy ideas: Kickstarter.

A few months and a lot of hard work later we found out that there were more than a few people interested in Mycroft when we successfully funded our first Kickstarter. With the press around our success, we got the attention of Techstars for their 2016 Kansas City program. We were accepted and that was when our little side project turned into a real company.

After Techstars Demo Day we raised a Seed round of financing and shipped our early developer kits to Kickstarter backers. Yes, those first developer kits were individually printed and hand soldered.

As 2016 progressed we continued to work on fundraising and brought in CTO Steve Penrod to accelerate software development.

Things were pretty quiet for the rest of 2016, as we worked hard to deliver the Mark I. That is, until we got into Batch 20 of 500 Startups.

Our team continued to grow as we raised money and delivered the Mark I in the summer of 2017.

That was an amazing learning experience and we are grateful to all of the community members who joined us in the beginning of this journey. 2017 brought many updates, including a new logo for Mycroft.

Without our community, we would not be where we are today. Join us to continue to make Mycroft great.