Nifty Drives Ltd

The Nifty MiniDrive - more storage for the things you love. Born in Manchester. Funded on Kickstarter. Beauty. Utility. Simplicity. Founded in 2012 by Piers Ridyard and Steven Levy, Nifty simply tries to make things that fill the small tech-shaped holes in our lives. It started out, as most things do, with a problem: Piers had run out of space on his newly acquired MacBook Air. 128GB is not much space to be starting out with and within about three months he had completely filled his computer. With Apple unable to sell an SSD upgrade and uncertainty as to whether a third party SSD would void his warranty, he looked around for a solution. Finding nothing, he decided to design a solution of his own. With the help of his co-founder Steve, Piers designed and developed the first version of the Nifty MiniDrive. They literally baked the first batch of MiniDrive PCBs in Piers' flat - applying the solder paste carefully, using a pair of tweezers to hand place the components and finally putting it in the oven for five minutes at 230⁰C (446⁰F). Shortly after making the first functional units, Piers and Steve launched the Nifty MiniDrive on Kickstarter. Hoping to raise $11,000 in 28 days, they were completely bowled over by the incredible level of support and response that eventually saw them raise $384,319 from 9,805 backers in 78 countries around the world! Suddenly Nifty was not just a cool little side project but a fully-fledged company-beast that now needed to be wrestled and tamed! With that, both Steve and Piers quit their jobs to focus on Nifty full time and build the foundations of a successful consumer electronics start-up. Flashing forward a bit, we now have a team of eight awesome people based out of Manchester in the UK and distribute the Nifty MiniDrive to over 30 countries, on five continents.