About

Mission

Opulo's goal is to help people manufacture their products. 

This blog post explains the ethos of the company, but in summary: Consider breaking the scales of producing a product into three broad categories. The smallest scale is prototyping, where you make 1-100 a year, using all hand tools, and very manual fabrication processes. The largest scale is mass production, where you hire a contract manufacturer to manage production of your product, use machines that cost upwards of a few million dollars, and requires a tremendous capital investment.

There currently isn’t much to help facilitate the third category, mid-scale production. This is where you have a significant number of units to produce (100-5000 a year), but not enough to justify hiring a contract manufacturer to make them for you.

The goal of the LumenPnP and future Opulo machines is to help folks bridge the gap between prototyping and mass production.

History

Opulo began as a project by founder Stephen Hawes. Stephen began developing the first version of the LumenPnP as a series of YouTube videos in early 2020. Over the course of the next year, the project gathered a following and Stephen quit his job to work on the LumenPnP full-time.

In 2021, Stephen's friend Lucian joined the team, the company was incorporated, and Opulo raised some money via SAFE note.

At the beginning of 2022, Opulo launched the first salable version of the LumenPnP (v2) which was sold as a kit. A few months later, the machine was updated to v3 which came almost completely assembled.