In 2015, the Zano mini drone became the most successful European project ever on crowdfunding website, Kickstarter, when it raised £2.3 million from more than 12,000 backers. But in November 2015, Torquing Group, the company behind the Zano, collapsed having shipped under 700 of the devices to customers.
While crowdfunding has transformed designers’ ability to make products independently, the Zano has become a cautionary tale about the risks of these campaigns. The original Kickstarter campaign video for the Zano stated that the palm-sized drone would have a built-in high-definition camera, intelligent sensors, Wi-Fi linked smartphone controls, and the ability to fly uninterrupted for up to fifteen minutes. But the few devices that were shipped performed poorly or not at all, and other drone manufacturers have since claimed that the Zano was impossible to build at such a low price.
Faced with severe criticism, Kickstarter commissioned an independent report on the Zano. It proposed that for “projects involving complex hardware, massive overfunding, or large sums of money [there] should be better mechanisms to identify weak projects before they fund.”