Nothing Technology, founded in London in October 2020 by Carl Pei and co-founders after Pei’s departure from OnePlus, has grown from a seed-funded startup into a $1.3 billion company with over 7 million devices sold and 13,000 community investors across 80 countries.

This page serves as a chronological index covering every major Nothing milestone, from its $7 million seed round and the acquisition of Essential Products’ IP, through successive phone and audio launches, the CMF sub-brand, three funding rounds, and physical retail expansion into Bengaluru, New York, and Tokyo.

I have been covering Nothing since the day Carl Pei announced it on Twitter in January 2021 with exactly the right amount of audacity and exactly zero product details. Five years later, the company he founded in London with a handful of co-founders and a design philosophy that sounds like an art school manifesto has sold more than 7 million devices, built 13,000 community investors across 80 countries, opened flagship stores on two continents, and is now valued at $1.3 billion. This is the complete story, post by post, from the moment Pei walked out of OnePlus to the opening of the Bengaluru store and everything in between.

Nothing is the most interesting consumer tech company of the 2020s, and most people in the West still haven’t heard of it. That gap between what the company is and how much attention it gets outside of enthusiast circles is what this series is here to fix. Every post covers a specific event, announcement, or milestone, in chronological order, with full context for what it meant at the time and what it tells us about where the company is going.

The founding: London, 2020

Carl Pei left OnePlus in October 2020. By December, he had raised $7 million in seed funding from Tony Fadell (iPod inventor), Kevin Lin (Twitch co-founder), Steve Huffman (Reddit CEO), Josh Buckley (Product Hunt CEO), and Casey Neistat. Nothing Technology Limited was incorporated in London on October 29, 2020. The public announcement came on January 27, 2021. The co-founding team included Akis Evangelidis, David Sanmartín García, Steven Gao, and Levi Li alongside Pei.

The name was chosen deliberately. When technology is good enough, Pei argued, it should fade into the background. It should feel like nothing. That philosophy, transparently displayed in hardware that literally shows its own internals through clear plastic backs and stems, became the company’s most recognizable asset within eighteen months of its first product.

Every post in the series

Why this company matters beyond the hardware

The standard tech press narrative about Nothing is that it is a design-forward brand with interesting aesthetics and a passionate community. That framing is accurate and insufficient. Nothing is the only new consumer electronics company to emerge in the last decade and reach genuine scale, meaning more than 7 million devices sold and more than $500 million in annual revenue, without being backed by a larger conglomerate or a national government. Samsung, Apple, and Google dominate the premium end. Xiaomi, OPPO, and BBK dominate the volume end. In between, the graveyard of brands that tried to carve out a middle position is extensive. HTC is essentially dead. Motorola survived only because Lenovo bought it. Essential died after one phone. OnePlus, the company Pei co-founded, was absorbed into OPPO’s cost-cutting machine.

Nothing is still independent. Still growing. Now a unicorn. The community investment model, where real consumers own equity in the company they buy from, is something no major tech company has attempted at this scale. The CMF sub-brand strategy, positioning CMF as a completely separate entity targeting budget consumers while Nothing goes premium, is the BBK playbook applied with far more transparency about what is actually happening. And the physical retail expansion, from London to Bengaluru to New York and Tokyo, is a bet that the experience of touching and using a Nothing product is itself a marketing function that no online ad campaign can replicate.

I cover Nothing because it is the most instructive case study in challenger brand strategy in consumer tech since OnePlus itself in 2014. And because Carl Pei, whatever you think of his hype cycles and cryptic announcements, is very good at this. The posts in this series go deep on every product, every funding round, every strategic move, and every market implication. Start anywhere, or read from the beginning. The beginning is more interesting than you would expect.

Related reading: Xiaomi 15 Pro, the value-flagship yardstick Nothing keeps getting measured against.