IIRC, the Anova cooking was originally one guy at the lab devices company that saw the Nomiku or Polyscience and said, "we can do that" and started basically doing this as a side business.
At the time of their first product launch, before the $1.8MM Kickstarter campaign, they already had 3 cofounders. Anova, Nomiku, and Sansaire all sort of started at roughly the same time. Sansaire is (IIRC) the Seattle Food Blog team, the people behind one of the more popular DIY Sous Vide kits. Nomiku was a DIY SV team from New York.
The thing about all these products is, the fundamental technology isn't difficult. The challenge is just straightforward hardware product development and execution, the basic stuff that's hard for everyone to get right --- along with marketing and inventory and channel management.
PolyScience, on the other hand, has been doing serious equipment manufacturing for a long time.
I don't have a source handy but the guy was present on a ton of food forums at the time, gathering feedback and responding to inquiries. He was pretty open that this was a one man side project at the time. I still own one of the V1 Anovas and sent him some UI feedback (including uncovering a bug where the calibration was done backwards on an early batch of machines).
The thing about all these products is, the fundamental technology isn't difficult. The challenge is just straightforward hardware product development and execution, the basic stuff that's hard for everyone to get right --- along with marketing and inventory and channel management.
PolyScience, on the other hand, has been doing serious equipment manufacturing for a long time.