Meet Adafruit Founder Limor Fried: Open-Source Hardware Revolution

Limor Fried is an engineer and creator of Adafruit Industries, a New York-based company that builds and sells open source hardware. Limor Fried, then a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began selling electronic kits on her website from her own designs in 2005. She later moved to New York City to found Adafruit Industries. In 2010, Adafruit offered a US$1,000 (equivalent to $1,149 in 2018) reward for whoever could hack Microsoft’s Kinect to make its motion sensing capabilities available for use for other projects. This reward was increased to $2000 and then $3000 following Microsoft’s concerns about tampering. In 2013, the company had $22 million in revenue; for 2014 increased to $33 million.