Episode Archive
67 episodes of The Hardtech Podcast since the first episode, which aired on August 25th, 2021.
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Ovul - Finding Product Market Fit in Femtech
October 6th, 2026 | Season 3 | 42 mins 38 secs
Serhii Zatsarynin, Founder and CEO of Ovul, joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman in person to argue that hardware is not hard anymore, and to explain why the best advice he has for founders is to sell the product while it's still ugly, because paid users and pilot users are not the same people.
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intent - AI Creating New Bottlenecks in IoT Development
September 28th, 2026 | Season 3 | 54 mins 53 secs
Peter Tuszynski, CTO at intent, joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to compare notes from both sides of a connected product, and makes the case that AI has not made hardware ship faster yet, it has made it less risky, and that speeding up engineering just moved the bottleneck to QA.
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Epitel - From Research to $26 Million Series B
September 22nd, 2026 | Season 3 | 57 mins 5 secs
Fresh off a $26 million Series B, Epitel CTO and founder Mark Lehmkuhle and Director of Software Engineering and Architecture J Carroll join DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to trace the path from a rodent lab at the University of Utah to a wireless wearable EEG sensor, and why the hardest problem left is not the signal, it is getting people to wear it.
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HoopDee - Started With Software, Ended With Hardware
September 15th, 2026 | Season 3 | 47 mins 14 secs
Roxie Alsruhe, Founder and CEO of HoopDee, joins Grant Chapman and Drew Westrick to talk about going from zero hardware experience to a manufactured product, and why she validated the idea with a PowerPoint and a handful of Amazon parts long before she ever paid for tooling.
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ClearObject - Turning Vision AI Into a Wearable
September 11th, 2026 | Season 3 | 48 mins 9 secs
Derek Bleyle and Tim Hagan of ClearObject join the show to explain how a software and vision AI company built its first piece of production hardware, a wearable that gives highway crews a warning when a vehicle enters their work zone. It is part vision AI deep dive, part honest account of what a software team learns the first time it has to ship atoms.
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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.