The company that decided the smartest thing in your house should be the switch on the wall.
It is 7 a.m. somewhere in a new-build home, and a hand reaches for the hallway switch. Instead of a click, the lights ease up, the morning playlist starts, the thermostat nudges warmer, and the front-door camera blinks awake - all from a single glowing rectangle on the wall. No phone. No five apps. Just a switch that happens to run the whole house. That rectangle is Brilliant's entire argument, made in aluminum and glass.
Brilliant Smart Home - legally Brilliant NextGen, Inc. - builds in-wall touchscreen control panels that replace ordinary light switches and quietly take over the jobs scattered across your gadgets: lighting, climate, music, intercom, cameras, scenes, and routines. The pitch is almost stubbornly simple. Smart homes got complicated. Brilliant decided to make the complicated part disappear into the wall.
The Brilliant BriefEvery good hardware company starts with somebody getting annoyed. For Brilliant, it was co-founder Aaron Emigh, who set out to make his home smarter and instead made it more confusing. Each new device was lovely on its own. Together they were a swarm - a different app to dim the lights, another to lock the door, a third to argue with the thermostat. The more "smart" he added, the dumber the experience felt.
So in 2015, Emigh teamed with Steven Stanek and Jeremy Hiatt with a contrarian idea: stop asking people to manage their homes from a phone. Put the controls back where everyone already reaches - the wall. The light switch, that humble century-old hinge of domestic life, would become the command center.
Controlling our home environments should be as simple as flipping a switch.
Brilliant's hardware is small enough to fit a switch box and broad enough to swallow the rest of your smart-home clutter. Here is what lives behind the glass.
An in-wall touchscreen with built-in Alexa that controls lighting, climate, audio, intercom, cameras, and connected devices - plus scenes and routines you set once and forget.
A Power-over-Ethernet panel on Brilliant's second-generation architecture, built for professional installers, builders, and integrators. One cable for data and power.
A connected in-wall dimmer that responds to the panel, the app, and your voice - so the rest of the house speaks the same language.
Drops lamps and ordinary appliances into the Brilliant ecosystem without rewiring anything.
Tying it together is the Brilliant app - one place for remote control, scenes, and managing the system whether you are in the kitchen or three time zones away. For a homeowner, it means fewer apps and less fumbling. For a builder or property manager, it means a connected home they can install once and hand over clean.
People retrofitting or upgrading a home who want control on the wall, not buried in a phone.
Luxury and new-construction builders embedding smart control into homes before the keys change hands.
Property managers wiring connected living into apartment buildings, unit by unit.
Professional installers who deploy the second-gen PoE control across whole projects.
Brilliant has raised roughly $70.7 million across four rounds from 17 investors. The road was not a straight line. A 2021 Series B pushed total funding past $61 million; a 2024 bankruptcy nearly ended the story; and a 2025 relaunch round put fresh fuel in the tank.
The 2025 round was led by Almeida Strategic Investments, with participation from NFL quarterback Tyrod Taylor's Strategic Investments Fund - earmarked for the second-gen PoE product and AI-driven features.
Aaron Emigh, Steven Stanek, and Jeremy Hiatt found Brilliant in San Mateo, California.
Brilliant secures a $40M Series B, bringing total funding to roughly $61M.
After a tumultuous bankruptcy, Brilliant is acquired by Almeida Strategic Investments (Evan & Michael Almeida) with David Blum, relaunching as Brilliant NextGen, Inc.
Brilliant NextGen unveils its second-generation smart home products.
The second-gen Power-over-Ethernet control begins shipping and debuts at CEDIA Expo; the company closes a $9.7M round.
The more smart products you add, the worse the experience gets - unless one system ties them together.
Brilliant competes in a crowded room - Control4, Savant, Crestron, Josh.ai on the high end; Google Nest, Alexa, and Apple Home on the DIY end. Its wager is geographic, not just technical: the others fight for your phone screen, while Brilliant claims the most valuable real estate in the house, the spot your hand already knows in the dark.
The 2024 bankruptcy could have been the ending. Instead it became a pivot. Under new ownership, Brilliant NextGen narrowed its aim toward builders, integrators, and multifamily operators - the people who install dozens of homes at a time, not one. The second-gen platform runs over a single Ethernet cable, the kind of unglamorous decision that integrators quietly love.
So return to that 7 a.m. hallway. Before Brilliant, the morning meant a phone, a passcode, and a small argument with three different apps. Now the hand simply reaches for the wall, the way hands have reached for walls for a hundred years - and the whole house answers. The switch didn't disappear. It just got a great deal smarter, and learned to keep the gadgets in line.