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Connected cameras became a trusted home-security system with a large installed base and recurring services.
$480M in 2017 (founder-confirmed figures)
Ring paired a clear household problem with a public founder, a memorable brand, and the capital to survive hardware growth.
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Jamie Siminoff began by building inventions in his garage and could not hear his doorbell. The first product, Doorbot, let a homeowner answer a doorbell through a phone-connected camera. He used a custom crowdfunding site after Kickstarter paused hardware projects, and Shark Tank exposure arrived just before the first shipment. The company reworked the product and brand as Ring, then used television advertising and a public founder presence to build a recognizable home-security brand. Siminoff says Ring had $480 million in sales in 2017 when it sold to Amazon for $1.15 billion. He later said the business had grown more than tenfold under Amazon and agreed with an interviewer’s floor of $4.8 billion in sales. He left after five years, returned in 2023, and now frames AI as a way to make home and neighborhood security more useful. These are founder-reported figures, not audited results.
Ring’s first buyers came through a presale for Doorbot. Siminoff said the campaign sold enough units that the team had to build the product, even though it did not raise tens of millions of dollars.
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Data credibility: Jamie Siminoff reports these figures in an interview. The $480M 2017 sales figure and current multi-billion-dollar sales are founder-reported, not independently verified here. The interviewer suggested a floor of $4.8B based on the stated tenfold growth, and Siminoff agreed. No filings or audited statements were cited.
The first customer money came from preorders for a camera doorbell, while early investor capital helped fund development.
Ring’s growth loop joined product visibility, trust, and wider reach. After the company renamed Doorbot to Ring and relaunched in 2014, Siminoff said the brand gained momentum.
Ring’s hardest early stretch was a Christmas Eve product failure, not a lack of ambition. A shipment of thousands of Doorbots contained camera software that could not be updated over the air.
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