Pearl Automation
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Pearl Automation was a Scotts Valley, California startup founded in 2014 by former Apple engineers Bryson Gardner, Joseph Fisher and Brian Sander (50 of its ~70 employees were ex-Apple). It built aftermarket car technology to bring modern driver-awareness features to older vehicles. Its first and only product, RearVision (launched September 2016), was a solar-powered license-plate frame with dual HD cameras, an OBD2 dongle and a smartphone app that turned a phone into a wireless rear-view camera.
02 / Pearl Automation FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Pearl Automation shut down after dismal sales of its single product. The RearVision system's $499–$500 price tag was far above the ~$20 cost of a basic wired backup camera, and its timing was poor — rear-view cameras were becoming standard on new cars (a US mandate took effect for model year 2019). Despite raising $50 million and receiving several acqui-hire offers, the company decided to close in 2017, about a year after its first product shipped.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Pearl Automation was founded.
- Operations ended
Pearl Automation ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Pearl raised $50 million in Series A and B rounds (Shasta Ventures, Accel, Venrock, Wellcome Trust) but its $499 RearVision system sold poorly.
- 02
Axios reported the company received several acqui-hire offers but chose to shut down instead.
- 03
Pearl Automation closed its operations in 2017; its Rear Vision product was acquired by American Road Products Inc.