CANDY HOUSE · Founder & CEO
Jerming Gu
He fumbled for coins at a Stanford Starbucks and walked out with a plan to delete your house keys. SESAME was the result.
Jerming Gu - the disruptor with a 3D printer
He fumbled for coins at a Stanford Starbucks and walked out with a plan to delete your house keys. SESAME was the result.
Jerming Gu - the disruptor with a 3D printer
SESAME does not ask you to rip out your deadbolt. It clamps on top of the one you have, grips the thumb-turn, and waits for your phone. That single decision - leave the lock alone - is the whole idea.
Most smart locks want you gone before they arrive. New hardware, a locksmith, a hole in the door. Jerming Gu went the other way. His company, CANDY HOUSE, makes a small robot that sits over an existing single-cylinder deadbolt and turns it. No replacing, no drilling, install measured in seconds. The lock is the only smart lock that syncs its motion to the phone, so it knows the exact angle the bolt has reached. Five patents protect that trick, and it lets one device fit just about any deadbolt in the world.
Today the lineup has grown well past that first robot. There is SESAME 5, SESAME 5 Pro and a US edition; biometric units that read faces and palm veins; touch pads; and a Matter-compatible hub for remote control. All of it runs on SesameOS, the software layer Gu's team built so the hardware could keep getting smarter after it shipped. The brand spent years becoming a household name for locks in Japan before turning back toward the market where it was born.
The through-line is stubbornly simple. Gu believes the phone should swallow the wallet and the keys, the way it already swallowed the camera and the map. He has been chasing that one sentence since he was a graduate student who could not pay for coffee without holding up the line.
He is, by his own description, a disruptor, a troublemaker, and an entrepreneur, and he says it in that order on purpose. He came up through National Taiwan University and then Stanford, where he was studying for a master's in mechanical engineering. He was, on paper, an indifferent student. He once said his grades were the worst in the class and that he did not care, because an A or a B was not how he measured success. The measure he preferred was whether a thing he built worked, and whether people wanted it. By that test, he was at the top of the class.
There has got to be smarter ways to live our lives.- Jerming Gu, on why he invented SESAME
Standing in line at a campus Starbucks, Gu watched classmates pay with a quick card swipe while he dug for coins. The embarrassment stuck. He got a debit card, then a bigger thought: if a phone can be a wallet, why not a key?
Living in a Stanford dorm, Gu printed a little machine that could turn an existing deadbolt. He brought in a Korean computer-science engineer to write the software. The first working prototype was held together by a graduate student's obsession.
Gu points to Steve Jobs and the iPhone as the spark. The idea that one device in your pocket could absorb the things you carry - that is what he wanted to do to the humble house key.
Gu co-founds CANDY HOUSE in the summer with fellow Stanford master's student Jongho Shin, building the first SESAME prototype in a dorm.
SESAME launches on Kickstarter on February 25. It clears its goal in roughly nine hours and raises about $1.4 million over two months - a crowdfunding sensation.
CANDY HOUSE JAPAN opens in Tokyo, planting the flag in a market that will become the company's stronghold.
The company raises about 600 million yen from ITOCHU Corporation and other backers, fuelling its hardware ecosystem.
A strategic alliance with lock manufacturer MIWA arrives, alongside roughly 350 million yen in fresh funding - old-world locksmithing meets new-world software.
CANDY HOUSE relaunches in the US and Canada after a decade away, this time with face recognition, palm-vein biometrics and Matter-ready hubs.
A lock that turns is a mechanical problem. A lock that knows who you are is a software problem. CANDY HOUSE needed both, so it was built by two people who each owned one half.
Gu, the mechanical engineer, owned the body - the small motor, the grip on the thumb-turn, the geometry that let a single device clamp onto deadbolts of wildly different shapes. Jongho Shin, a fellow Stanford master's student out of computer science, owned the brain. Together they shipped the first working prototype in the summer of 2014, the two halves finally talking to each other.
That split is still visible in the products today. The hardware is unmistakably an engineer's work: minimal, almost shy, designed to disappear against the door. The software is where the company keeps its promises about guest keys, access logs, and remote unlocking. Gu has always insisted the two are one product, not a gadget with an app bolted on. The lock and the phone are partners, the same way he and Shin were.
A viral campaign is a starting gun, not a finish line. After 2015, the loud part ended and the patient part began - and most of it happened in Japan.
In 2017, Gu opened CANDY HOUSE JAPAN in Tokyo. It was not an obvious move for a Silicon Valley crowdfunding hit, but it turned out to be the making of the company. Japan rewarded exactly what SESAME was good at: a tidy retrofit that respected the door it was installed on, software that kept improving, hardware that aged gracefully. Over the years the brand became a serious name in Japanese smart locks while staying nearly invisible to the American audience that first funded it.
The validation arrived in capital and in company. In 2022 the business raised around 600 million yen from ITOCHU Corporation and other backers - a trading-house endorsement that few hardware startups ever earn. Then, in 2024, came something stranger and more telling: a strategic alliance with MIWA, a long-established lock manufacturer, paired with roughly 350 million yen in new funding. The disruptor who started by working around the old lock industry was now shaking its hand.
That MIWA alliance is the whole arc in miniature. Gu spent his twenties insisting there was a smarter way to live, and that the legacy lock business had grown complacent. A decade later, the legacy lock business decided it would rather build alongside him than against him.
In 2025, CANDY HOUSE returned to the United States and Canada - the markets that had launched it and then watched it disappear. The company that came back was not the one that left. The dorm-room robot had become an ecosystem: SESAME 5 and a US edition, biometric units that read a 3D face or the veins in a palm, touch pads, open sensors, and a hub that speaks Matter so the lock can join the rest of a connected home.
The pitch had matured too. Where the 2015 SESAME sold a single delightful trick - your phone is your key - the 2025 lineup sells choice. Unlock with a phone, a face, a palm, a card, a tag, or a touch, and let the software keep a clean record of who came and went. The minimalist body is still there, still trying to vanish against the door. The ideas behind it have simply had ten more years to harden.
Gu's sentence has not changed. Consolidate the essentials into one device. Spend money on what matters and not on hassle. He said versions of it as a broke graduate student, and he is still saying it now that ITOCHU has invested and MIWA has signed on. The difference is that more doors now agree with him.
"Disruptor, troublemaker, entrepreneur."
"My grades are the worst in the class. But I don't care, because getting an A or B is not how I measure success."
"The reason I invented Sesame is because I believe there has got to be smarter ways to live our lives."
SESAME mounts over your existing deadbolt instead of replacing it. Most doors, no locksmith, install in seconds.
It is the only smart lock that syncs the bolt's movement with the phone, giving exact control over how far the lock turns.
SesameOS lets the devices improve after they ship - access logs, guest keys, remote unlocking, multi-user control.
Newer products add 3D face recognition and palm-vein authentication for keyless, card-less, phone-less entry.
The Hub 3 brings remote control and Matter compatibility, folding the lock into the wider smart-home universe.
Consolidate everything into a single smartphone, and spend money on what actually matters - not on hassle.
The lock-turning robot is named SESAME - a wink at "open sesame."
The very first prototype was 3D-printed in a Stanford dorm room.
Gu once said his grades were the worst in his class - and that he genuinely did not care.
SESAME does not replace your lock; it rides on top of the deadbolt you already own.
The founding idea came from a coffee queue, not a whiteboard.
Before the US comeback, the brand spent years becoming a smart-lock leader in Japan.
Put the wallet and the keys where the camera already went - in your pocket.- The CANDY HOUSE thesis