In another signal that consumers' homes are the new battleground for tech colossuses, Samsung announced on Thursday that it was buying Internet of Things startup SmartThings for a reported $200 million.
Re/code reported the figure, which was attributed to anonymous sources. SmartThings CEO Alex Hawkinson confirmed the acquisition in a blog post, but didn't describe any financial terms. SmartThings will now operate as an independent company within Samsung’s Open Innovation Center group, Hawkinson said.
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The company's team will move to Palo Alto, California, but will still be called SmartThings, he added. It is currently based in Washington, D.C.
SmartThings launched in 2012 as a Kickstarter project. A power outage at Hawkinson's vacation home, which caused the basement pipes to explode, inspired him to start the company. As a result, he dreamed up a wireless hub that connects to sensors around a house, facilitating a so-called "smart home" that can be controlled by a smartphone.
Hawkinson's timing was good. Although home automation has been around for decades, it's still far from mainstream. At the same time that SmartThings launched, Nest Labs, a "smart thermostat" created by former Apple engineers Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, was hitting the market.
In January, Google bought Nest for $3.2 billion, demonstrating that the tech giant was keen on colonizing smart homes, much like how it colonized smartphones with the much-cheaper Android acquisition in 2005. In its World Wide Developer's Conference in June, Apple showed off its HomeKit concept, which envisioned a Siri-controlled home -- and the race was on.
Even before all that activity, Gartner predicted in late 2013 that by 2020, the Internet of Things market would grow 30-fold to $300 billion.