pi lab – Edwin the Duck wins Scale-up Company of the Year ($100K-$5M)

The makers of smart toy Edwin the Duck — pi lab received the Scale-up Company of the Year ($100K-$5M) award during TechPoint’s 17th annual Mira Awards honoring the best of tech in Indiana.

pi lab, winner of the 2015 Mira Award for Mobile Tech for their smart toy Edwin the Duck, has taken the toy world by storm. Edwin — a “smart” duck that through a Bluetooth connection with a mobile app — sings, tells stories, and plays games with children to help them learn.

Bursting onto the scene in retail store last fall, Edwin has continued to develop as technology product. His ever-growing library of content has advanced beyond the basics to include teaching good manners, self confidence, positive decision making skills and more with content being added at an outrageous pace.

Since his Mira win, Edwin has gone on to sell out in stores around the country and racked up a multitude of other awards from companies and trade shows coast-to-coast. Moving forward, pi lab plans to add more characters to the lineup, translate Edwin and future friends into over 8 languages, add multi-player games and provide an opportunity for Edwin and company to add original music, live performances, television shows, movies, and more.

The Mira Awards judges were impressed with the product itself, but the agile way in which Edwin was developed and brought to market has set the pi lab company up for a growth story that has already hit 10x and will take the company to near eight-figure revenue territory in less than a year. pi lab took a novel, but solid product offering from idea to concept in a matter of months and followed it up with 14,000 units sold in a single selling season in limited distribution through Apple and Best Buy stores. Recent expansions to Toys R Us, Amazon, InMotion and thousands of other retailers globally, Edwin and pi lab are taking scale-up to incredible heights and demonstrating a level of B2C success that isn’t often seen in the Indianapolis tech community.

TechPoint, the growth initiative for Indiana’s tech ecosystem, honored Indiana’s best companies, entrepreneurs, educators, and other leaders for their technology excellence and innovation at The Westin in downtown Indianapolis during the 17th annual Mira Awards gala presented by Angie’s List, Interactive Intelligence, and Salesforce.

A total of 17 award winners and seven runners-up were chosen from the 98 outstanding companies, organizations, and individuals who were selected as nominees this year out of the 168 applications received highlighting achievements during the 2015 calendar year.

Forty independent, volunteer judges spent more than 700 total hours reviewing and ranking applications, interviewing nominees, and selecting this year’s winners. Judges included company founders, CEOs and presidents; CTOs, CIOs and software developers; professors and chancellors from Indiana universities; design, human resources and sales professionals, and a variety of other subject matter experts.

Browse photos from the event in TechPoint’s Facebook albums and watch videos on TechPoint’s YouTube channel.

The Mira Awards — named after a variable star thousands of times brighter than the Earth’s sun — represent the best of tech in Indiana each year.