On June 23, 2026, Groove Thing — billed as "the world's first internal music player" — opened direct ordering at gthing.com following a record-breaking Kickstarter, with units from the first manufacturing run expected to begin shipping at the end of August. The summer 2025 crowdfunding campaign drew more than 1,600 backers who collectively pledged over $533,000, setting a world record for the highest-raising crowdfund of any insertable sex toy in history. Buyers who missed the campaign can now place orders directly through the newly launched storefront.

Why It Matters

The pleasure-device market rewards a defensible technical story, and Groove Thing's audio-to-haptic translation is a patent-pending differentiator that's harder to commoditize than yet another air-pulse clone. Its record crowdfund also validates that backers will fund ambitious sextech hardware at scale — useful signal for founders navigating an investment landscape where institutional capital still treats the category as a "ghost market." Execution risk now shifts to manufacturing and fulfillment as first units ship in late August.

The device was invented by Michael Weiss-Malik, a former NASA Mars-mission software engineer and Silicon Valley executive, and is positioned as an entirely new category sitting between audio and intimacy. Unlike "sound-responsive vibrators" that merely buzz monotonically to a beat, Groove Thing's patent-pending technology claims to faithfully convert audio into high-fidelity physical sensations that mirror the complex tones and textures of music — enough detail, the company says, to distinguish high notes from low and piano from guitar. The hardware ships as a pair of stereo speakers that deliver sound to the ears alongside a handheld resonator with multiple attachments for internal or external use.

"Music should be felt, not just heard," Weiss-Malik said. "We're redefining how people connect with their favorite songs, opening new creative possibilities for musicians, and helping break down shame around bodily pleasure. This isn't just a new product; it's a whole new type of experience." The framing deliberately straddles consumer-audio gadgetry and pleasure tech, a positioning that earned the device coverage at NAMM and from outlets including WIRED and New Atlas during its campaign.

For the device segment, Groove Thing is a reminder that crowdfunding remains a viable launch path for genuinely novel pleasure hardware despite the industry's well-documented payment-processor and platform headwinds — and a counterpoint to recent crackdowns (Kickstarter briefly banned then reinstated adult projects in May 2026 under Stripe pressure). A half-million-dollar raise and a public commercial launch suggest demand for category-defining gadgets that sidestep the "another vibrator" framing.

Sources

Update — 2026-06-26

Initial entry — story first created.