Investors are pouring money into startups that are changing consumers’ home lives. While some startups are providing services that help with household chores, others are trying to transform your home itself by making it smarter. We used CB Insights data to identify 84 funded private companies that are making households more efficient and convenient.
Building Robotics Inc., better known as Comfy, raised $12 million in Series B funding for building automation software that helps companies save energy on office air conditioning while gathering employee-contributed data about the use and occupancy of a workspace.
On Friday, Nest CEO Tony Fadell announced in a blog post that he was flying off from his roost—a move that isn’t so surprising considering recent reports about tensions between Fadell and employees and the fact that Nest hasn’t done much to widen its smart-home ambitions since Google paid $3.2 billion for the smart-thermostat maker in 2014.
Notion, a connected home startup headquartered in Denver, closed $3.2 million in additional funding as part of the second tranche of a previous seed round from last year.
XL Innovate led the deal with Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures participating. Notion has now raised a total of 5.7 million dollars in addition to a successful Kickstarter. The company currently has 11 employees and has plans to expand to 25-30 over the next year.
Freshened up with $3.25 million in funding, Molekule is launching what it calls the world’s first molecular air purifier.
The San Francisco company says that it can eliminate the full spectrum of indoor air pollutants, breaking them down on a molecular level. The product is one of a series of Internet-connected devices that detects the quality of the air we breathe, and it’s one more expression of the Internet of Things, or smart and connected everyday devices.
A Los Altos startup called Afero raised $20.3 million in a new round of venture funding to secure connected devices, from toys and arcade games to medical equipment. The company’s technology works even when WiFi isn’t, employing 4GLTE and other radio sensors.
Afero works with large hardware makers who install the startup’s proprietary chip in their IoT devices or components.
Nest has released an open-sourced version of its Thread protocol, making its home automation network technology more broadly available to developers. The introduction of OpenThread is expected to give parties interested in working with open-source technology all the benefits of building on Thread — allowing them to continue innovating without dealing with the current limitations of the protocol.
This project is the company’s first open-source initiative.
The residential real estate tech market map spans emerging categories like mortgage tech, virtual viewing, and property-management software, among other categories.
While the now-public Zillow and Zoopla might be seen as dominant names in residential real estate tech, there are a slew of startups working in real estate listing and search services and carving out a variety of emerging categories within the residential space.
Perhaps the home of the future will be filled with robots. Or maybe that home itself will be a robot.
That’s the vision some technologists have for the future of domestic living, and a startup called Brain of Things announced Thursday that it is developing what the company’s founder refers to as “robot homes” in three locations in California.
These apartments come with a stunning array of sensors and automated fixtures and appliances. They also have the ability to learn and adapt to residents’ habits and preferences to an almost creepy degree, thanks to computer servers that collect data and use it to build models of behavior using machine-learning algorithms.
Smart doorbell startup Ring has raised a further $61.2 million in a series C round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with participation from existing investor Sir Richard Branson.
VentureBeat first discovered Ring back in 2013 when the startup was known as Doorbot — which was basically a doorbell equipped with a Wi-Fi-connected camera. In the intervening months, the Santa Monica-headquartered company has rebranded and developed new technology and products such as Ring Chime, motion-detection smarts, and a cloud-based video storage hub.
