Zigfu

Overview

Zigfu was a San Francisco-based developer tools startup that built a cross-platform software development kit (SDK) on top of Microsoft Kinect and other depth-sensing hardware.Founded in 2011 and backed by Y Combinator's Summer 2011 batch, the company's core thesis was that gesture-control technology would become a mainstream computing interface — and that Zigfu would own the developer tooling layer that made it accessible.

The company attracted genuine developer interest, secured OEM licensing deals, and earned validation from Microsoft's own developer channel.But it never raised a second round of funding, launched its commercial product nearly a year late, and dissolved gradually through 2012 as co-founders departed one by one. The primary cause of failure was a self-reinforcing trap: the team spent its limited runway chasing venture capital instead of monetizing the organic traction it had already built, and by the time it launched a commercial product, there was no money left to grow it. ^[1]

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Founding Story

Zigfu's origin story begins with a piece of consumer hardware and a founder who couldn't leave it alone.

When Microsoft launched the Kinect in 2010, Amir Hirsch started hacking it immediately. Before Zigfu existed, he had already built motion-based applications for teaching dance routines and military maneuvers — practical experiments that gave him a concrete sense of what gesture-controlled software could and couldn't do. ^[2] Hirsch held bachelor's and master's degrees from MIT in mathematics and electrical engineering and computer science, and had previously founded Tinker Heavy Industries, building interactive characters and educational mobile apps for children. He had also worked as an engineer at Quickware, developing a PDP-11/70 replacement system to control nuclear power plants — a background that combined hardware fluency with software product experience. ^{[3] [4]}

Hirsch co-founded Zigfu with Ted Blackman and the two entered Y Combinator's Summer 2011 batch together. ^[5] The founding team's most significant early move came approximately one month into the YC program: Hirsch recruited Shlomo Zippel out of PrimeSense — the Israeli firm whose 3D sensor technology Microsoft had licensed to power the Kinect — using $150,000 from SV Angel and the Start Fund, plus an additional $50,000 from Romulus Capital. ^[6] Zippel had led the applications and UX team at PrimeSense, giving Zigfu direct insider knowledge of the hardware stack it was building on. ^[7] Zippel then convinced his PrimeSense colleague Roee Shenberg to relocate from Israel to join the team, completing the four-person founding group. ^[8]

The founding thesis was straightforward: gesture control was going to become a mainstream computing interface, and the developer tooling layer was wide open. As Hirsch described it, the goal was to make Kinect development as accessible as possible — binding the OpenNI open-source framework to popular development environments so that any developer could build gesture-controlled applications without needing deep expertise in 3D sensor middleware.

The team's YC interview reportedly included making Paul Graham perform the hokey-pokey as a live demo — a detail that captures both the novelty of the technology and the showmanship required to sell it. ^[9]

The team's composition was unusually strong for an early-stage hardware-adjacent startup. Two of the four founders had built the underlying sensor technology from the inside. The CEO had already shipped motion-based software products. The gap — which would prove consequential — was on the business and distribution side, where the team had no prior experience scaling a developer platform.