It’s CES 2014, and once again, SmartThings has taken over an entire house in Las Vegas to showcase all the cool things you can do with its home automation platform. Last year, when we visited the SmartThings house, the company didn’t have any actual products on the market.
Well, a lot has happened since then — it’s shipped the first generation of SmartThings products to its Kickstarter backers, it’s launched a whole new app to make it easier to get your house up and running, and it’s signed up more than 5,000 developers making hardware and apps that work on its platform.
This year, when we stopped by the new SmartThings house, we got to see exactly how far it’s come. That starts with the app that powers it all. SmartThings CEO Alex Hawkinson gave us a demo of how users can quickly get up and running on the platform.
We also got a demo of some of the automation features that have been added to SmartThings. Thanks to its new SmartThings Labs initiative, it’s got apps to support apps and products from companies like Sonos and Philips Hue bulbs. With that integration, you can do things like let your house know that you’re awake, and have it turn on the lights, start up your coffeemaker and turn on your music player.
SmartThings recently raised $12.5 million from Greylock Partners and Highland Capital Partners. Other investors include First Round Capital, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, CrunchFund*, Max Levchin, Yuri Milner’s Start Fund, David Tisch, A-Grade Investments, Chris Dixon, Vivi Nevo, Alexis Ohanian, Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky, Kal Vepuri, Ryan Sarver, Jared Hecht, Steve Martocci, Emil Michael, Aaron Levie, Zorik Gordon, and Nathan Hanks.
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*CrunchFund was started by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington
