When the hardtech community converges in Las Vegas for CES, magic happens. Last week, the Boast team joined 878+ hardware founders, builders, and innovators at the ninth annual Founders + Friends event, a one-night networking incubator that’s become legendary for sparking connections between the people building tomorrow’s breakthrough technologies.

As a Silver partner alongside NVIDIA, Nordic Semiconductor, Hubble, and Cadstrom, we showed up with a mission: Help hardware innovators understand how R&D tax credits can extend their runway and recoup critical investments in product development.

Inside the Premier Hardtech Networking Event

Presented by HardTech Forum and MistyWest, Founders + Friends has earned its reputation as the must-attend CES side event for a reason. This year’s “blue sky future” theme brought together:

  • NVIDIA Physical AI Startup Pitch Showcase featuring 10 cutting-edge companies pushing boundaries in robotics, healthcare, and physical AI
  • Live demonstrations from 2025 HardTech Award winners including Pila Energy, Kalogon, and Aurea Technologies
  • Interactive showcases from Canadian robotics innovator Haply Robotics
  • Multi-room activations designed to facilitate meaningful connections between industry leaders

The event’s invitation-only format creates an intimate environment where founders can have substantive conversations about the real challenges of scaling hardware companies; from supply chain complexities to capital efficiency to, yes, maximizing available funding through government incentive programs.

Why Boast Sponsors Hardtech Innovation

Hardware companies face unique R&D challenges. Unlike software startups that can iterate quickly with minimal capital, physical product development requires:

  • Significant upfront capital for prototyping, testing, and manufacturing tooling
  • Longer development cycles with physical constraints that can’t be debugged with a code push
  • Cross-functional expertise spanning mechanical engineering, electronics, firmware, and software
  • Regulatory compliance that varies by industry and geography

These realities make non-dilutive funding through R&D tax credits especially valuable for hardware innovators. The federal R&D tax credit can offset qualified research expenses, while many states offer additional incentives for companies developing innovative physical products.

Yet despite the substantial benefits—often representing 6-10% of qualified R&D expenses—many hardware companies either don’t claim these credits or significantly undervalue their claims by missing eligible activities.

Voices from the Hardware Frontier: Featured Interviews

Our video interviews captured the diversity and ambition defining today’s hardtech renaissance. Each conversation revealed how strategic fundingenables breakthrough innovation:

Cadstrom: Preventing Circuit Board Problems Before They’re Built

Margot Blouin from Cadstrom perfectly captured the event’s energy: “Physical AI is so back this year.” Her Montreal-based team helps electrical engineers identify and resolve circuit board design problems before manufacturing begins, saving time, reducing costs, and accelerating time-to-market. Margot’s community-first approach to supporting innovators at all stages mirrors Boast’s mission of helping brilliant minds behind world-changing tech work more efficiently.

Kalogon: Seated Health Innovation That Increases Blood Flow

As Timothy Balz explained, connecting with builders “who really KNOW and get hardware” makes Founders + Friends essential. Kalogon delivers medically-validated seated health through dynamic cushions that change shape to match users’ bodies, increasing blood flow and preventing pressure injuries for wheelchair users and anyone sitting for extended periods. This kind of medical device innovation requires sustained R&D investment; exactly where tax credits provide critical runway extension.

Looking Glass: Building the Holographic Future

Shawn Frayne and the Looking Glass team have invested over 10 years innovating on both software and hardware to deliver holographic displays. Their technology promises to revolutionize retail, advertising, and consumer engagement, helping brands “leave Flatland for good.” Long development cycles in emerging display technology make non-dilutive R&D funding especially valuable for sustaining innovation momentum.

Hubble Network: Bringing Bluetooth to Space

Apoorva Nori from Hubble Network is literally bringing Bluetooth to space, connecting everyday Bluetooth devices directly with satellites and 90 million Earth-based access points. Hubble enables power-efficient, cost-effective IoT devices that can be tracked from anywhere. This category-defining infrastructure innovation exemplifies the capital-intensive R&D that benefits most from strategic tax credit optimization.

Common Themes Across Conversations: Hardware founders are intensely focused on capital efficiency, need partners who understand physical product development complexity, and require funding solutions that work on their timeline—not annual accounting cycles.

Technology Meets Expertise: The Boast Approach for Hardware

What became clear through our Founders + Friends conversations was that hardware innovators need R&D credit solutions built for their unique reality. Boast’s platform-plus-expertise model addresses this directly:

Automated Activity Tracking integrates with tools hardware teams already use—CAD systems, project management platforms, payroll systems—to capture qualified R&D activities without adding burden.

Physical Product Expertise from specialists who understand nuanced qualification criteria for everything from iterative prototyping to manufacturing process innovation.

Audit-Ready Documentation creates comprehensive systems of record that document not just expenditures, but qualification rationale, which is essential for hardware companies facing government scrutiny.

Multi-Jurisdictional Support across federal and state programs, plus cross-border optimization for companies operating in both U.S. and Canadian markets.

The Hardware Renaissance Needs Smarter Funding

The NVIDIA Physical AI Startup Pitch Showcase underscored that we’re entering a new era where AI converges with physical products to create transformative technologies. Companies like MetAI, NEURA Robotics, RoboForce, Psyonic, and others demonstrated how this hardware renaissance is unfolding.

This innovation wave faces a paradox: High development costs meet selective venture funding. Companies need every available dollar working for them, which makes optimized access to non-dilutive R&D funding strategic, not optional.

The math is compelling: A hardware company spending $3 million annually on qualified R&D could recover $300,000+ through combined federal and state credits. For early-stage companies, that’s potentially six months of additional runway (or, in some cases, the difference between reaching the next milestone or running out of capital).

Beyond CES: Continuing the Conversation

Founders + Friends was one incredible evening, but the conversations continue. If you’re building hardware and want to understand how R&D tax credits can accelerate your development:

Join the Hardware Innovation Community

The energy at Founders + Friends reflected something bigger than one event: A growing recognition that the next wave of transformative innovation will come from companies building physical products that change how we work, heal, travel, and live.

These companies deserve financial tools as innovative as their products. R&D tax credits represent one of the most powerful—yet underutilized—funding mechanisms available to hardware companies.

Whether you’re developing robotics, medical devices, manufacturing equipment, cleantech hardware, or the next generation of AI-enabled physical products, Boast is here to help you access every dollar of R&D funding you’ve earned.

Ready to see what you’re leaving on the table? Get your free R&D credit assessment and discover how Boast’s technology-plus-expertise approach can accelerate your hardware innovation journey.