We Speak Brands

Carl Pei’s Nothing Is Now a $1.3 Billion Brand

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

Nothing founder and CEO Carl Pei. Photo by TechCrunch, via Wikimedia Commons.

Carl Pei helped build OnePlus into a cult favourite, then walked away to start over. The start-over is now worth $1.3 billion. On September 16, 2025, London-based Nothing closed a $200 million Series C round led by Tiger Global, with GV, Highland Europe, EQT and Qualcomm Ventures among the backers, taking the company’s total funding past $450 million.

Nothing’s pitch was never to out-spec the giants. Founded in 2020, the company bet on design as the differentiator: transparent-backed phones that show their components, a distinctive Glyph light interface, and earbuds that look like nothing else on the shelf. The bet has compounded. Nothing crossed $1 billion in lifetime sales in 2024 and has shipped more than five million devices, with its first true flagship, Phone (3), landing in July 2025. Its community has skin in the game too: thousands of fans have invested in the company through community funding rounds.

The new capital points at a bigger swing. Nothing is developing what it calls AI-native devices, a new category of hardware designed around artificial intelligence rather than retrofitted with it, with the first devices expected in 2026. At the same time, it spun off its budget CMF line as an independent subsidiary headquartered in India, complete with a $100 million manufacturing joint venture, freeing the main brand to push upmarket.

In a phone market ruled by two or three names, a five-year-old London startup reaching unicorn status on design, community and nerve is its own headline. Pei named the company Nothing. The valuation suggests he knew it would not stay that way.

We Speak Brands

On Now Sprays Its Shoes On With Robots, and It Is Scaling Fast

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

We Speak Media

On's Cloudboom Strike racing shoe, the line built on the brand's LightSpray innovation. Photo by Rmason75, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

A typical athletic shoe upper takes around two hundred steps to make. On’s newest racing shoes take one, performed by a robot arm with a spray nozzle. On July 3, 2025, the Swiss running brand inaugurated the world’s first LightSpray factory at its headquarters in Zurich, a 1,400-square-metre facility where four robotic arms spray a continuous filament onto a midsole, fusing upper and sole into one piece in a few minutes, with no gluing or stitching.

LightSpray was four years in the making, developed by a team of around twenty colleagues, including materials scientists and roboticists, working out of the On Labs in Zurich. The technology first appeared before the Paris 2024 Olympics on the Cloudboom Strike LS, a shoe weighing about 170 grams that has since been worn at the front of major marathons, including by New York City Marathon champion Hellen Obiri. Because the sprayed upper has no seams and uses minimal material, On says the process dramatically cuts waste and emissions compared with conventional shoe-making, while moving production closer to the runners who buy the shoes.

The Zurich plant turns out to be a pilot for something much bigger. In February 2026, On opened a second LightSpray factory near Busan, South Korea, with thirty-two robots and roughly thirty times the production capacity, starting with shoes beyond racing, such as the LightSpray Cloudmonster 3 Hyper, while the research and development that feeds both plants stays in Zurich.

It is a fitting arc for a brand born in the Swiss Alps in 2010, when former professional triathlete Olivier Bernhard teamed up with David Allemann and Caspar Coppetti to build shoes around pieces of garden hose. Fifteen years on, On is not just selling shoes. It is reinventing how a shoe gets made.