Are you aware of or have you heard any stories about a hardware startup having a bootstrap after/with a prototype built with Arduino or similar boards?
I don't know , but this is a great post on the subject: <a href="http://www.nickhunn.com/i-come-to-praise-arduino/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nickhunn.com/i-come-to-praise-arduino/</a><p>Tldr:the arduino don't take you beyond prototyping, the mbed could.
I've worked with a couple of companies (not startups) that used beagle board Blacks for prototypes. The BBB is open source and is basically a "reference design" so you can reuse the design on you own board if you want.