Vestaboard
California maker of internet-connected split-flap messaging displays. Led by founder Dorrian Porter, it reported more than 25,000 owners in August 2026 and has raised about USD 10 million in seed funding.
Industry: Consumer electronics and smart displays | Location: Palo Alto, United States | Founded: 2017 | Total Funding: USD 8.8M
About Vestaboard
Vestaboard is a California company that makes a smart messaging display built from mechanical flaps, in the style of the arrival and departure boards found in old train stations. Dorrian Porter is the founder and chief executive. Porter has said the idea came from a trip to a Paris train station, where the flipping board made him want to send his children a more striking message than a text. Development took several years of research and multiple design iterations, with help from designers who had worked on Amazon's Nest products and from industrial designer Fred Bould. The original Vestaboard has 132 individual character units, called Bits, arranged in a grid of 22 columns by 6 rows. Each Bit can show letters, numbers, symbols and colours, with 64 possible states, and the board is rated for millions of flips. Owners send messages through an app, by email or through integrations, so the display can show reminders, quotes, weather, scores or data from connected services. The company also sells to businesses, which use the boards in offices, shops, restaurants and public venues, and offers tools for developers who want to connect their own data to a board. Vestaboard financed its early growth through seed rounds rather than institutional venture capital. In 2020 it announced the close of a USD 3.7 million seed round, along with more than USD 5 million in pre-orders, with a further USD 750,000 planned from accredited investors. Named participants included Hany Nada, Bob Abbott and Baroda Ventures, the investment firm of David Bohnett. In August 2022 the company opened a new seed round that it described as led by its customers. Third-party databases put total funding at roughly USD 9.65 million to USD 10 million across several rounds, and the figures differ between sources. In 2025 the company launched Vestaboard Note, a smaller, more affordable messaging display built from more than 2,800 spinning flaps, which Vestaboard introduced in May 2025. It later won a Red Dot Award. Vestaboard said in March 2025 that its sales had risen 40 percent year to date compared with the same period in 2024, and Porter has written that year-over-year sales grew by nearly 50 percent within about nine months, a period in which the company also changed factory partners. The company has since announced the Note Array, a modular system that combines several Notes into custom configurations ranging from a small grid behind a shop counter to large installations. Pilot installations included the US Open, Truist Park, Paradise Brewery and a Fast Company gala, and Vestaboard said it would show the system at InfoComm 2026 in Las Vegas. The company has also marked its tenth anniversary with a new product unveiling.
Leadership
- Dorrian Porter, Founder and Chief Executive Officer
- Faiza Moore, Head of Product Design
- Mark Confroy, Head of Product & Customer Experience
- Ian Guyer, Head of Hardware & Manufacturing
- Tyson Cadenhead, Head of Software Engineering
- Ellen Loeshelle, Head of Software Product and UX
- Amy Wong, Finance
- Steve Zadesky, Advisor to the CEO