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VCs tend to dislike manufacturing startups. It takes a lot of capital to get going, some time to get good yield & work out the early flaws, and there isn't much potential for a huge exit in 5-10 years.

I'm more surprised that the printer market hasn't followed the security camera market, with lots of cheap and open options on markets like AliExpress that ship with phone-home firmware.




Printers are far more precise devices than you'd think. Building a camera from off the shelf Sony image sensors, slapping it in a plastic shell with a small ARM or RISC-V MCU is way easier of a design challenge than building a functioning printer.


Back in the 1990s a lot of laser printers used Canon engines so they only had to develop the RIP and the plastics. I wonder if that still exists.




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