[BoorishBears]

The original kickstarter wasn't near enough for their initial goals without VC money (they raised 300k, which was only about 1,000 a backer)

And yes, in such a capital heavy field like fitness hardware, there would have been massive VC pressure.

The only way to drive that would have been to essentially show "they scale like software, not hardware". So sell investors on rapidly increasing revenue while sweeping the massive (even by tech standards) burn rate under the rug as temporary.