Equipment is going to be a huge expenditure. As a hardware startup currently spending big on manufacturing equipment, I feel your pain. I've seen a few hardwar

Equipment is going to be a huge expenditure. As a hardware startup currently spending big on manufacturing equipment, I feel your pain. I've seen a few hardware startups use alternative approaches to this space, which depending upon your target business model may be viable. One option is, if you are selling hardware with your own software and configuration, the hardware manufacturer may gift/loan/discount development hardware to you to facilitate your development work. Another option is leasing or timeshare of the equipment. Finally, vendor financing may allow you to defer payment for 12-24 months without the overhead of seeking external capital. Outside of the above methods, at a business process level having a rapid and well documented pipeline for per-unit assembly that does not necessitate pre-purchase can help to defer per-unit costs (shift from pre-fab to post-purchase fab) without greatly blowing out lead time from the customer perspective.