About the show
The Hardtech Podcast pulls back the curtain on the bold ideas, design challenges, and engineering breakthroughs behind today’s most innovative hardware products — and the people who make them happen. From first sketch to final build, we dive deep into the minds shaping the future of physical tech.
The Hardtech Podcast on social media
Episodes
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Babba - Heating and Cooling Baby Bottles at Scale
August 31st, 2026 | Season 3 | 47 mins 32 secs
Heating and cooling a baby's bottle sounds simple, but it is one of the hardest problems in consumer hardware. Dan Evans, CEO and founder of Babba, joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to unpack the nonlinear world of thermoelectric cooling, the technology he first mastered at RecoverX (acquired by Hyperice) and carried into the baby space. It is part engineering deep dive, part founder's playbook on prototypes, customer feedback, and the grind of fundraising and go-to-market in hardware.
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Nuvio - Putting a PT in Your Walker
August 24th, 2026 | Season 3 | 55 mins 23 secs
For many older adults, the hardest thing isn't walking. It's standing up. Matt Cumella, founder and CEO of Nuvio and a doctor of physical therapy, joins Grant Chapman and Drew Westrick to explain how he reinvented the walker around that moment, and then turned it into a sensor-driven platform that puts a physical therapist's eye right inside the device.
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Special Episode - The AIM IN Summit 2026
August 18th, 2026 | Season 3 | 1 hr 10 mins
The next decade of technology may hinge less on AI itself than on the factories, batteries, and machines that make it real. In this special episode, Grant Chapman goes solo with Ben Wrightsman, founding board member of AMVIC, for a 30-year tour through electric race cars, the battery pedigree behind modern EVs, and the hard-won lessons of scaling hardware, all building toward the upcoming AMVIC AIM IN Summit.
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Lexia Solutions - Giving Everyone a Seat at the Table
August 17th, 2026 | Season 3 | 44 mins 1 sec
What if the most powerful accessibility product in a stadium was not built into the building, but wheeled up to your seat in under a minute? Jeff Runnels, co-founder of Lexia Solutions and inventor of Uplift, joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to trace a remarkable arc: from the "blue group" and an undiagnosed learning difference, to a battery-powered lift that gives wheelchair users a real seat at the table, and a business model that makes venues want to provide it.
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Eight Sleep - Building a $1.5B Sleep Company the Hard Way
August 11th, 2026 | Season 3 | 54 mins 22 secs
Your bed may be the most under-optimized eight hours of your day. Sam Kang, Chief Product Officer at Eight Sleep, joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to unpack how the Pod heats and cools your bed, why cooling is so much harder than heating, and his framework for latent demand and the art of the MVP. It is part engineering deep dive, part product masterclass from inside a company that has turned sleep into a $1.5B category.
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ohSnap! - The Engineering Behind Invisible Design
August 3rd, 2026 | Season 3 | 51 mins 46 secs
Most mobile gaming accessories feel like bulky, clunky afterthoughts, but ohSnap set out to build a magnetic phone controller that feels like a natural extension of your device. Shafae Ali, Head of Engineering at ohSnap, joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to break down the electromechanical craftsmanship behind their products. From mastering tactile snap-fits and magnetic latches to balancing obsessive user experience with cold engineering math, this episode explores what it really takes to build hardware people love to touch every day.
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Alenthia Run - From PT Clinic to Wearable Device
June 29th, 2026 | Season 3 | 43 mins 14 secs
Most runners only get their form analyzed after an injury, in a lab full of motion-capture cameras. Cooper Boydston, CTO of Alenthia Run, joins DeAndre and Grant to explain how his team shrank that lab into a small sensor that lives on your sacrum and reads your running biomechanics on every run. It's part running-science deep dive, part candid hardware-founder story about prototypes, UX, and the long road from "it works" to a product people love.
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Venture Declassified - Moats & Multiples in Hardtech
June 8th, 2026 | Season 3 | 1 hr 4 mins
What actually changes when you raise money for a hardware company instead of a software one? In this Hardtech Podcast crossover with the Venture Declassified crew (Jacob Schpok of Elevate Ventures, Mike Kelly of Start Something Ventures, and Ben Pidgeon of VisionTech), Grant plays the founder and asks three active investors to grill him on how hard tech is underwritten differently at pre-seed, seed, and Series A: the metrics, the moats, the multiples, and why the same traits that make hardware slow and expensive early are exactly what make it defensible later.
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Articulate Labs - Turn Everyday Movement Into Physical Therapy
June 8th, 2026 | Season 3 | 46 mins 30 secs
Most muscle-stim gadgets work best when you do nothing. Articulate Labs built the opposite: a wearable that fires your muscles in sync with how you move, turning a walk or a grocery run into real strength training. Co-founder and CEO Josh Rabinowitz and hardware lead Herbie (Larry) Kirn join DeAndre and Grant for a rare deep-technical episode on the device, the science of recovering properly after knee surgery, and the messy, honest reality of funding and selling hardware.
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Fisher Wallace - One Device for Depression, Anxiety & Insomnia
June 8th, 2026 | Season 3 | 41 mins 28 secs
Kelly Roman went from a Harvard English degree and a graphic-novel adaptation of "The Art of War" to running one of the only brain-stimulation companies on a path to FDA approval. He joins Grant Chapman and Drew Westrick to unpack Fisher Wallace's nearly 17-year journey: designing a sham device you genuinely can't feel, why depression is regulated as a Class III device, and the brutal economics of clinical trials, reimbursement, and IP in prescription hardware.
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QCI - Quantum Computing & the Future of AI
June 8th, 2026 | Season 3 | 46 mins 5 secs
Quantum computing, finally explained without the hand-waving. Cesar Martinez Delgado, hardware engineering manager at Quantum Computing Inc. (QCI), joins DeAndre and Grant to break down how quantum machines actually work, why QCI is betting on photonics to make them run at room temperature, and how 15 years of building things, from 3G networks to drones, shaped the hard-won engineering lessons every hardware founder needs to hear.
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OCTO - The Art of the Hardtech Agency
June 8th, 2026 | Season 3 | 47 mins 7 secs
Justin Sirotin, founder and CEO of OCTO, industrial designer, and the seasoned agency owner, joins DeAndre and Grant for a candid, founder-to-founder breakdown of what it really takes to build a product agency that lasts. From surviving 2020 without firing anyone, to why sales is the hardest job in the building, to knowing when to let a client "graduate," it's a masterclass in the unglamorous economics of relationship-based businesses.