This Delaware State alum is developing pocket-sized portable speakers

We’ve all seen portable speakers, but really, how great is the quality of those speakers? Meet BumpOut, a startup that believes audio quality shouldn’t be compromised simply because it’s portable. Which is why the company has created a pocket-sized water-resistant solution. Our sister site Technical.ly Philly covered the West Chester, Pa., company earlier this month.
Delaware State University alum Mat Chacko founded the company with business partners CEO Zac Pierce and vice president Brian Zamrowski. The project is currently running an IndieGoGo campaign that has exceeded its funding goal by 55 percent and is still getting funding with over a week left for its campaign.
“We actually have consultants that have retired from [working with] Harman Kardon and JBL to streamline our engineering and manufacturing process,” said Chacko. The consultants, Mike Giffin and John Crisco, have worked on manufacturing speakers with the aforementioned audio engineering giants.
There are a lot of portable speakers on the market, what’s so different about BumpOut’s speakers? Well for one, Chacko says that a lot of speakers on the market invest more in packaging as opposed to what’s inside the speaker. “We actually placed a motorized expansion system in a speaker, when you hit the button is expands out. … We wanted to create something that was truly portable,” explained Chacko. The speakers can stick to any surface because they’re reinforced with a 3M adhesive layer. These speakers are pretty affordable, too. They’re going for $50 a piece on the IndieGoGo campaign.
Chacko met Pierce through volunteering at their high school alma mater as wrestling coaches, a sport they both enjoyed while they were students themselves. They ended up becoming great friends and bounced business ideas off of each other and that’s how BumpOut came to be.