&gt; Have you looked at more conventional forms of funding?<p>We have, but hardware doesn&#x27;t lend itself to small amounts of money.  And there are different trajectories depending upon whether you can get 500 thousand, 2 million, or 5 million.<p>The folks I work with are <i>religious</i> about maintaining a low burn rate.  Hardware has a <i>LOT</i> of NRE, and you can get in deep trouble very quickly.<p>We actually had to be very hard-nosed with customer which we expected to be profitable with about 100K volume (actually kind of the Valley of Death in electronics volume--100K has all the NRE of huge volume without the profitability) because we simply couldn&#x27;t take the risk with cash we had in reserve.  If the customer didn&#x27;t follow through, the NRE would have killed the company.  This is a <i>very</i> different discussion if you have 5 million in the bank.<p>In addition, while I can&#x27;t prove it, I suspect that we lost some funding because we&#x27;re religious about burn rate management.  VC&#x27;s want &quot;Go big or go home&quot; and someone who is managing burn rate well is anathema to this.