Nothing
Nothing - Technology should fade into the background and feel like nothing
Nothing was founded in October 2020 in London by Carl Pei, co-founder of OnePlus, alongside a small team of former OnePlus colleagues including Akis Evangelidis. Having spent years building the fast-growing smartphone brand, Pei set out on a new mission: build genuinely delightful consumer technology in a market he felt had become predictable, cluttered, and increasingly indistinguishable from itself. Backed by a striking list of early investors, including iPod inventor Tony Fadell, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, and filmmaker Casey Neistat, Nothing set out to build an entire ecosystem of connected devices, starting with the simplest category first.
That debut arrived in July 2021 with the Ear (1), a pair of true wireless earbuds built around a striking semi-transparent, dot-matrix design created in partnership with Swedish design house Teenage Engineering — instantly setting Nothing apart from the sea of near-identical black earbud cases on the market. The transparent design language became the brand's signature, carried through into the acclaimed Phone (1) in 2022 and subsequent Phone and Ear generations, each pairing genuinely distinctive industrial design with thoughtful, uncluttered software.
Headquartered in London and continuing to expand its device ecosystem, Nothing has grown quickly into one of consumer tech's most talked-about young brands — proof that Carl Pei's founding belief, that great technology should feel effortless rather than showy, resonated with far more people than just the audiophile crowd.