Nailbot Instant Nail Art Becomes Battlefield Finalist

A woman’s lifestyle company, Preemadonna has been named a finalist in the startup battlefield at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco this week. Preemadonna has invented a nailbot that instantly prints custom nail art on your fingernail using a smartphone as a controller.

For those unfamiliar with the event, TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield is a competition where early-stage startups pitch their companies to a panel of judges to win a prize of $50,000. 25 companies presented their products onstage and that group was narrowed down to 6 finalists, including Preemadonna. The winners and finalists also receive attention from the press and venture capital companies. Since the competition began, $4.4 billion of capital has been raised with 65 companies getting acquired and two going public.

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Preemadonna was founded two and a half years ago by two women, chief executive officer Pree Walia and head of product Casey Schulz. It is backed by SOS Ventures and Helen Greiner, who was a cofounder of iRobot, the maker of the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. It received $250,000 in its first round of financing.

The company’s prototype uses Hewlett-Packard’s thermal technology, your phone’s camera, machine vision, computer vision and other technologies. Users can create their own art or use other designs including licensed designs like Disney’s “Frozen” princess Elsa.

While there have been nail printers in the past, Preemadonna’s nailbot uses a smartphone as the controller, differentiating this product. The initial product is priced at $199, but the company believes as it grows it can bring the price down by half in three years. The company also plans to make money off of the licensed art and not just the hardware of the nailbot with future visions of painting more than just nails.

Having said that, their demographic of teen girls numbers 21 million — 92 percent decorate their nails and 14 percent do it daily. The nail category is also a $15 billion business. The company has several prototypes they are working on at this time, but have not given a date for the product to be on the market.