Today, Framework is THE repairable modular laptop company. Tomorrow, it wants to become a consumer electronics company, period. This is one of the main reasons he just raised an additional $18 million – it wants to expand beyond the laptop into “additional product categories”.
Nirav Patel, CEO of Framework, tells me that this was always the plan and that the company originally had other viable ideas beyond laptops. “We chose to tackle the laptop business first,” he says, in part because Framework knew it could accelerate its ambitions by catering to PC builders and tinkerers and Linux enthusiasts left behind. on behalf of large OEMs and partly because it wanted to go big or go further. House.
If Framework could succeed in laptops, he thought, it would be able to build almost anything.
After five years of designing laptops, what could Framework add to the portfolio? Patel won’t say – I only get the most basic clues, no matter how many different ways I ask.
He won’t even say whether they will make less or more noise than laptops. Framework could choose an “equally difficult” category or could instead try something “a little smaller and simpler to run, streamlined now that we have all this infrastructure.”
He also won’t say whether they will also be launched by passionate gadget enthusiasts or whether they will be geared more towards the everyday consumer. (Patel recently suggested to Jason Carman This Framework could adapt its marketing to reach more everyday audiences.)
“The first product is the first stake in the ground. »
But Patel suggests these new products won’t be one-offs: When Framework raises money for a new product category, it lays out a roadmap for how to continue that product year after year. “Every time a product comes on a roadmap, we’re not going to say, ‘It’s fixable, that’s all.’ The first product is the first stake in the ground.
The company’s $9 million seed round funded the original 13-inch laptop design, which lasted for three generations of components. Framework’s $18 million Series A paid off Laptop frame 16.
It comes to mind: could the Framework team need focus on a few lingering issues with laptops before moving to a new territory? But Patel says the company’s laptop teams won’t shrink over time: it’s just that certain cohorts, like industrial designers, don’t need to stay once a design is locked.
(Unlike most laptop manufacturers, design lock-in is an advantage for Framework since the idea is to allow you to keep the same chassis year after year when upgrading and repairing parts .)
Patel says the Framework Laptop 13 and Framework Laptop 16 have a long life ahead of them, although he still won’t really commit to the 16-inch model benefiting from future GPU upgrades. “You will be the first to know,” he told me.
Today, Framework has about 50 employees and plans to grow to 60 before the end of the year, with “some additional team growth” in 2025. It’s a small company that needs to grow. associate to produce material; I suspect its laptop partner, Compal, for example, does a bit more than just running assembly lines.
So if you’re interested in finding out what Framework is up to next, you might want to take a look at the network of relationships the company is building, because there’s an explicit hint about it in its press release: “We’ve had a certain number of first contacts. partnership discussions with other startups in our investors’ portfolios,” one line reads.
Another line points out that Cooler Master, which designed the thermal solution inside the Framework Laptop 16 and is now a direct investor, could also help Framework create new products. “We currently have additional collaborations with the Cooler Master team in incubation.”
Framework also says it will allow 100 community members to each invest $10,000 of their own money in the business, as long as they are qualified investors.
