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In the world · Entrepreneurship · 27 January 2025

Pebble: the smartwatch brand that closed and came back

Pebble shut down in 2016. In 2025, Google opened the code, the founder recovered the brand and the watches returned. What the comeback teaches.

bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published

Pebble, the smartwatch brand that sold more than 2 million devices and shut down in 2016, is back. In January 2025, Google opened most of the code of the watches' operating system. In May, the original founder, Eric Migicovsky, launched new models through a new company, Core Devices. In July, he recovered the Pebble name. In 2026, the watches went into production and began reaching customers. It is one of the clearest comebacks of a brand many people had written off.

What happened

Pebble was born from crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter. According to Google, the first was the platform's most funded at the time, and the Pebble Time campaign the second largest. In four years, the company sold more than 2 million watches. In 2016, it shut down when Fitbit bought the company and its intellectual property. Later, Google bought Fitbit, and the watches' operating system, PebbleOS, became Google's.

The watches did not die for good. A group of volunteers, the Rebble project, kept the old devices working. The comeback came in stages:

  • January 27, 2025: Google published most of the PebbleOS source code. Google itself noted that proprietary parts, such as chip support and Bluetooth, were left out;
  • May 2025: Eric Migicovsky's Core Devices unveiled new watches based on that system;
  • July 2025: the Pebble brand was recovered, according to The Verge;
  • March 24, 2026: the Pebble Time 2 entered mass production, according to the company's blog;
  • September 30, 2026: the Pebble Round 2 began shipping.

Why it matters

The story shows that a closed brand is not always lost. Three things sustained the comeback. The first was the community: the users who kept the watches alive for years proved there was demand. The second was open source, which removed the obstacle of rebuilding everything from scratch. The third was the founder who did not let go of the idea and came back for it almost a decade later.

For entrepreneurs, there is a practical lesson. Closing a company does not erase what it built: customers, reputation, technical know-how and an idea that still makes sense can be the starting point for the next attempt. None of this guarantees success the second time. The new Pebble still has to prove the business can stand on its own, and the smartwatch market is dominated by much larger companies.

In Bairo's view

For Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, Pebble's return is the logic of the seventh attempt seen from the outside. He tells his own story through that number: several attempts that did not work out before one stood on its own, and the one that worked carried within it everything the others had taught.

In his reading, every no is the ground of a yes. Bairo says he had a technology idea that arrived too early and that he was pushed out of the partnership that would have carried it forward. For him, what Pebble shows is that an idea can outlive the business that housed it, as long as someone keeps believing in it and the market's moment arrives.

Bairo does not treat the comeback as a rule. Many brands close and never come back, and insisting without learning is just repeating the mistake. The Seventh Attempt Method proposes something else: ask what is inside each no, prove small and get back in the game with what remained.

Where this meets the ecosystem

The fronts Bairo founded start from ideas that heard no before taking shape. CEASA Bank, an agribusiness financial platform, was born after banks refused to integrate the solution he had built. CLAIN, an orchestrator of artificial intelligence agents, is the proposal to give small entrepreneurs support to review what went wrong and plan the next attempt, always with the decision in a person's hands.

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In the world: Entrepreneurship