British firm Kano has raised $15m (£9.9m) of new funding to back its build-your-own-computer kit for children, while launching a new model six times faster than its predecessor.

The company, originally backed by $1.5m of Kickstarter pledges in 2013, is also returning to the crowd for investment, offering $500k of equity through crowdfunding site Quire.

Kano is also trying to shift perceptions that the sole use for its £120 computer is about teaching children programming skills, even though this remains a key feature.

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“What we’re building here is a new kind of computer company, with creativity rather than consumption at its core. There’s a need and a hunger for a new type of creative computer around the world,” chief product officer Alex Klein told the Guardian.

“Kids might start with using code to create a Minecraft castle or make music, but where it evolves is using a PC as a platform for invention and taking control of the world around you: talking to the internet of things rather than just consuming it. We’ve evolved from a cool Kickstarter kit to an end-to-end computer company.”

Kano has sold 40,000 of its first-generation kits so far. Klein said that the company has been surprised at the range of uses children have found for it, from time-lapse photography to building games consoles, solar panels and weather stations.

Moving beyond a “cool Kickstarter kit” is one reason why Kano has become a name to drop in Silicon Valley circles. The new funding round was led by US venture capitalist Jim Breyer, formerly of Accel Partners where he led investments in Facebook, Spotify and Etsy.

His current role at his own firm Breyer Capital is just as important for Kano, which is the company’s first UK investment. “He understands education, and he’s the most pre-eminent western VC currently involved in China and Chinese projects,” said Klein.

Kano’s first kit was unsurprisingly popular with tech-savvy parents in the UK and US, but the mention of China hints at the company’s global ambitions – including so-called “emerging” markets like China and India.

Klein hasn’t been impressed by some previous attempts to launch computers for children in these countries.

“There’s a lot of interest today in ‘Let’s build cheap computers for the emerging world! Let us westerners sit together in our cool offices with our cool whiteboards and design something that would be really good for an emerging market audience!” he said.

“That’s well-meaning, but can sometimes lead to products designed quite condescendingly. What we want to do instead is design a series of computer kits and add-on kits that you build yourself, then connect to other devices in the world around you.”

Kano OS. Photograph: PR

For now, that’s mainly a screen and keyboard for Kano, but Klein is keen for people to start thinking about what’s possible when the device is, say, a thermostat or solar panel.

“It’s a great way to introduce yourself to personal computing that shows it doesn’t have to be through a sealed sapphire screen: it can be an open, human device that you make yourself,” he said.

“We need a PC company now that takes advantage of all the new powers that the 21st century has given us. In sub-Saharan Africa, half a billion people are going to come online in the next decade: and that next generation will not be entering the digital age through a mechanism which is just about consumption, but which is creative.”

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Klein also stressed the point that Kano isn’t just about learning to code, suggesting that some of the recent drive towards children and programming may have suffered from “top-down” thinking that underestimated its audience.

“The dialogue in this space initially was quite top-down: ‘We have to teach kids to code or they will be unemployed! Quick, remove arts form the curriculum and make it all about science, technology, engineering and maths!’ The message was learn to code or else,” he said.

“It was all about rejigging the curriculum to create this prescriptive hierarchy of Python tutorials and making sure every child can code by the time they’re seven. And we’re involved in education – we partner with schools and Pearson – but one of the reasons we were able to grow quite quickly is that we turned that message on its head.”

How? Kano’s marketing is now focused more around three concepts – “Make, learn, play” – with an emphasis on accessibility at a time when children have more access to open-source software, affordable computing hardware and online communities to get inspiration for creative projects.

“What doesn’t exist is a computing platform to bring these together in a way that’s simple and playful and approachable. Kids – well, kids of all ages: beginners – don’t have a nice, human way in. We’ve divided up the arts and sciences and we’ve made programming into a purely technical, vocational skill,” said Klein.

“But you don’t have to become a programmer and work at Google. There are 8.2bn connected devices in the world, and you should have a way to play with this new world whether you want to be an artist or a musician or a journalist or a shopkeeper or whatever.

“It’s about understanding the world around you, and a PC that does this is a lot more mainstream than just a way of teaching kids how to code. Coding is a means to an end rather than the end itself.”

Community is a big part of Kano’s strategy, in several ways. First, with the return to crowdfunding, albeit in return for equity in the company rather than computer kits this time.

“The more participatory this next step is, the more our community has a chance to feel that the final products will be better and more successful. Kickstarter gave us so much interesting insight, from the case design to business models and school packages,” said Klein.

“All kinds of interesting ideas bubbled up from the community. We don’t want to be the kind of company that is a bunch of smart people in cool offices standing around white boards, set apart. We want to be a new type of PC company built by and for the crowd.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kano is putting more emphasis on children’s creations in its Kano World.

The focus on community extends to Kano World, the online repository for projects that children have created using their Kano computers.

“It was conceived as a last-minute feature if I’m honest with you: a cloud storage platform for all the stuff you’d make on Kano as there was so little storage on the SD card itself,” said Klein.

“It’s evolved into a user-generated carnival of kids’ creations, and a place to learn from one another rather than just from us.

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“The type of company we’re going to build is less about the hardware and the software than it is about the experience of making, and the community from which you learn and gain inspiration. It’s a new way of thinking about a PC company, but one maybe more suited to the various trends that are shaping personal computing today.”

One risk is alienating that community by launching a new Kano that’s six times more powerful than the one some of them bought a few months ago, thanks to swapping its original Raspberry Pi guts for the new Raspberry Pi 2.

“New Kano”, as the company describes it, is demonstrably faster than its predecessor, with new software including artistic app Make Art and game Terminal Quest, which blends adventuring with command-line Linux spells.

What about people who bought an “Old Kano” though? They’re being offered a “Powerup Kit” for £69.99 that includes a Raspberry Pi 2 to install in their existing Kano, while upgrading the swapped-out Pi 1 into an “internet of things toolkit for beginners”.

“There’s a tendency to make devices that are ‘here’s the coolest new thing, you can throw out the old thing out now’. We feel a bit different: that having your new Kano shouldn’t mean the old one is useless,” said Klein.

The Powerup Kit also sits neatly within Kano desire to make its kits about more than just coding by connecting them with other kinds of devices – something likely to be driven by their owners as much as the company and its investors.

“This is the first generation of kids whose abilities may outstrip us while they’re still kids. They have access to more information, and fewer barriers in the way of invention,” said Klein.