We all got a great New Years Wrap Up from our friends in California! In case you don’t get the emails for some weird reason, here it is!

Welcome to 2016! New Year’s Day is the perfect occasion for reflection. The past 12 months have been quite the journey for us. We began as five guys in a garage with a shared desire to build easy to use robotic technology that would transform the experience of content creation. Today, we are an organization of 37 people with offices in both San Francisco, California and Northern China. How did we get here? Let’s take a trip down memory lane.

After months of continued hardware, software, and design iteration in our Menlo Park garage, we launched our pre-order campaign on May 12th, 2015. Millions of you watched our video and flooded our inboxes with volumes and volumes of excitement. It was an exhilarating day. We were delighted to discover that so many people across the globe wanted to welcome our flying camera into their lives. If there’s one thing we know about the Lily Community so far, it’s that you are a truly diverse crew powered by incredible stories.

After launch, we expanded our team quite a bit more and began to ramp up for production, refining our design and manufacturing techniques so we could produce your Lily Cameras at scale. Over the course of Summer and Fall 2015 we made crucial product improvements from our original model, like using ultrasonic welding to waterproof your wearable tracking device. After Lily China thoroughly prepped and tested our manufacturing facility, the first units off the production line landed safely at HQ.

We’ve now produced over 200 pre-production units, our engineering team has begun taking Lily Camera out into the wild for testing, and the team is making great progress.

Just last week, we were thrilled to announce that we have secured 15 Million dollars in private funding, which gives us the freedom to continue the development and production necessary to bring you the best Lily Camera possible in Summer 2016.

We feel so fortunate to be tackling new challenges every day, and to have such a supportive group of people behind us who believe in our vision.

Cheers to you. Happy 2016!

-Team Lily