From Michael Welling on the SparkFun blog:

My Adventures with Open Hardware

While watching an Adafruit show-and-tell episode, I noticed that Scott Shawcroft was presenting a new feather baseboard he designed and assembled that was based on the SiFive FE310 RISC-V microcontroller. I ending up helping Scott debug his design, which in turn helped me develop some contacts at SiFive. We were using such early silicon that we even ended up helping correct mistakes in the chip documentation. In the meantime, I had created the LoFive design, using a Teensy-like form factor.

Having a design ready gave me enough leverage that SiFive ended up providing samples of the FE310. I ended up hand-assembling several of the LoFive boards, and handed most of them out for free at the Open Source Hardware Summit 2017 in Denver. After a few months, I was talking to Ron Justin from GroupGets about potential new campaigns. LoFive came up so we launched it! The LoFive campaign went on to be one of their most successful, with 257 percent funding and units that were shipped throughout the world, which was quite unexpected. During the campaign, I even got to visit to the SiFive headquarters while in San Francisco for Linaro Connect.