Smartisan's obsessive design won awards — and 600 million yuan in debt

Smartisan was founded in May 2012 by Luo Yonghao, a former English teacher and popular blogger who had no hardware experience. The company's first phone, the Smartisan T1 (May 2014), won an iF Gold Award for industrial design — a rare accolade for a Chinese startup. The T1 featured a custom Android skin with irregular icon shapes, obsessive symmetry, and hardware quirks like a hidden SIM tray integrated into the volume rocker. It launched at ¥3,000, competing directly with established brands.

Despite critical praise, Smartisan never achieved volume. The T1 suffered production delays and quality issues. Subsequent models — the budget Nut U1 (August 2015), the T2 (December 2015, with no dedicated power button), and the M1/M1L (2016) — all sold poorly. The company burned through venture capital from investors including CITIC Securities, Sina Weibo, and Mango Fund, raising over ¥1 billion across multiple rounds, but never reached the scale needed to be profitable.

By mid-2018, Smartisan was 600 million RMB (approximately $89 million) in debt. Luo Yonghao declared on Weibo that he would not file for bankruptcy and would repay creditors through 'busking' — a public vow that drew attention but did not stop the company's collapse. The company diversified into air purifiers, disposable vapes (the Flow brand, which also won an iF award), and Bullet Messenger, a messaging app. None generated sustainable revenue.

In 2019, ByteDance — the parent company of TikTok and Douyin — acqui-hired Smartisan, taking over its patents and signing most of its hardware engineers. One more phone (the Nut Pro 3) shipped under ByteDance, preinstalled with Douyin. ByteDance halted Smartisan device production in 2021 and shifted focus to education hardware, which never sold. A Smartisan TV OS was announced for Konka TVs in 2022 but never shipped. Luo Yonghao later founded Thin Red Line, an AI assistant startup.