Meeting Massimo Banzi at Sensors Converge 2023 felt like a breath of fresh air.
His manner and tone were so easy to take and his diction so precise that I was frankly surprised, given how many times I’ve met top brass at tech companies and have left afterwards feeling mystified as to why this or that person ever got such a job.
For those who don’t know, Banzi is one of the co-founders of Arduino where he serves as chairman and chief marketing officer. The company is based in Switzerland, but Banzi is Italian, so he offers a true pan-European flair with his colorful gestures and precise English. He’s also a college professor, which undoubtedly helps him explain tough concepts to usually informed, but not always learned, reporters like myself.
We were talking, mainly, about the new UNO R4 boards, one with Wi-Fi and based on 32-bit MCUs from Renesas, up from 8-bit in the R3, which first emerged in 2011. Meanwhile, the company was operating a booth at the Sensors event focused heavily on Arduino PRO, which the company classifies as edge IoT technology. There is a big connection between UNO and PRO, mainly that UNO feeds the needs of young talent that will go on to become PRO makers and designers. (Read on for more on Banzi’s big idea.)
RELATED: Arduino’s newest UNO R4 boards to ship in July, starting at $20
Also present at our informal meeting was Guneet Bedi, general manager for Arduino Americas. The company just announced his move to the post, which includes oversight of sales, marketing and operations teams coming to Austin and Chicago which will support the fast-growing Arduino PRO products in manufacturing, city operations and higher ed.
Arduino was founded in 2005 and boasts something like 32 million Arduino customers, but the PRO line was first introduced in 2020 and now has 1,000 enterprise customers on board. Sales have doubled each year since the PRO line was introduced in 2020, Bedi said.
The key message from both men is something Arduino has advertised for years: open source. The theme out of the early years was how hobbyists could use UNO boards to make useful things, even for some heavy-duty research. Now that theme has shifted to PRO’s ability to meet the needs of engineers who cut their teeth on UNO. (Or perhaps similar products from Raspberry Pi and others, my thought.) “Today’s new generation of engineers grew up building with Arduino,” Banzi said in a statement.
“Arduino is not just a platform for today’s engineers, but also a catalyst for creating a skilled workforce of tomorrow. By combining industrial-grade reliability with the vast resources of our open-source community, we enable businesses to thrive in today’s competitive landscape.”
Well, ok, that statement sounds like PR-speak, but it could have been something Banzi actually said. The point is that he and the company are on to something. Forgive the comparison, but this pathway at Arduino is not entirely different from raising an entire global generation on Happy Meals at McDonald’s and then seeing them come back again and again well into their older years for Big Macs. More than half of Arduino’s business comes from the US, land of marketing, endless burgers and some really good tech, too.
Aside from the recent news points about UNO R4 shipping in July and Bedi’s role in the Americas operation, Bamzo talked about a smattering of ideas, edited slightly as follows…
On Arduino growth: “We are profitable and growing every year with sizeable investments lately from Renesas, Bosch and Arm. PRO is a company inside a company for industrial standards equipment.”
On supply chain snafus: “The supply chain has been challenging for us, but it is getting better slowly. Some of the products we made have to do miracles…The silicon shortage is still a problem. In the PRO space there is reduced volume. Sometimes suppliers send random shipments and that’s annoying. It affects mainly processors, microcontrollers, ICs and power supplies.”
On attracting new talent: “We have 170 engineers globally. Arduino never had huge issues in finding people. The reason is, people love Arduino. People choose Arduino. Software engineers love the idea.”
On markets and US : and other countries’ embargoes of China’s products: “The US is our biggest market and then the EU. China is not a big market for us. Manufacturing is in Italy and nobody is afraid of Italy. (Laugh from Bedi.) Nobody has problems with us.”
On embedded security: “We have embedded hardware security and for years basically everybody was saying nobody cared, but now the issues of security are facing everybody. We are very well prepared with the cryptographic secure element. The devices authorize with the cloud secure element. We offer something secure out of the box. With other platforms, you do it yourself. On embedded security, we are doing very well.”
On generative AI and related: “We work on machine language, mostly on the edge as tinyML. We combine ML on the edge for a lot of value. We have a lot of internal R&D on using LLM in our tools. We are doing research on how LLM can be used in our products.”
On the Arduino name: “Arduino was the name of this guy who used to be the first king of Italy in about the year 1000. But that name came from a bar in Ivrea, Italy, where I used to drink.” (For the record, Arduino started as a tool for students at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea.)
On what keeps him up at night: “It’s a combination of problems. The silicon shortage is still a problem. One of the other issues is there are so many opportunities to pursue and people to talk to. It’s about managing growth. “
On advice for startups: “One of the things I tell people is that there’s an element of luck. I showed up at the right moment and it was interesting looking at something nobody cared about. People thought what we did was stupid and so they don’t worry about you. Our original intended audience was clearly not engineers. At the start, other people were interested in other platforms. For startups, it takes time, a number of years before gaining traction. You have to figure out how to stay alive until you get traction. The rule of thumb was seven years and we started in 2005 and had real traction in 2012.
One last aspect of success as a startup: “Stay really focused on the user experience, really, really focused. Be obsessed with the customer experience. Arduino went against the classic embedded world. It was called ‘baby talk programming for potheads, toys of electronics.’ The old-school embedded types started calling it names. But a lot of embedded guys love this. It works really fast to do something, create something…
“I’m very proud of the fact we built a platform to really solve big problems. We have a researcher who developed a sensor to detect a certain cancer from urine. Before Arduino, researchers never built equipment themselves and now you have biologists with Arduino who are not engineers. Teachers are using Arduino to build their own equipment. For data acquisition, it’s very easy to use. The new R4 will be a high-performance data capture tool with a native USB-C port. If you don’t have training in electronics, you don’t have to wait for an engineer to show up and say, ‘Can you make this?’ That communication loop is never efficient when you have to say, ‘This is what I want, make it smart.’
“Our mission is on the PRO. That’s the lane we are going in, but we are huge in other types of products we make, and they feed into the PRO market.”