Lisa
Petrucci

In 2024, when Brilliant Smart Home was acquired out of financial turbulence by private investors, most observers assumed the company would be wound down quietly. Lisa Petrucci had other ideas. She stayed on as CEO, not as a placeholder, but as an architect. Within months she had the company rebranded as Brilliant NextGen Inc., repositioned squarely at the builders and property managers who actually install smart home systems at scale, and on the road to its largest product launch in years.

The in-wall touchscreen control panel is a peculiar product category. It sits at the intersection of hardware manufacturing, interior design, and enterprise software - three industries that rarely share vocabulary, let alone supply chains. Petrucci's career is essentially the biography of someone who has never minded occupying precisely that kind of uncomfortable intersection. She co-founded an e-commerce company in 2002, long before anyone used the word "proptech." She sold partnership deals at Dun and Bradstreet when the data industry was still explaining itself. She led global marketing at Joyent when cloud infrastructure was still a hard sell. By the time she joined Brilliant in 2018 as VP of Business Development, she had already crossed more category lines than most executives manage in a lifetime.

What she built at Brilliant from 2018 onward wasn't just a sales pipeline. It was a distribution thesis: that smart home adoption would happen through builders, not consumers. That the person most likely to get a touchscreen panel into a home was the developer pouring the concrete, not the homeowner scrolling Amazon at midnight. It's a contrarian bet in an industry obsessed with DTC virality, and it's the bet that the new investors - Almeida Strategic Investments, Cullinan Holdings, and Tyrod Taylor's Strategic Investments Fund - backed with $9.7 million in September 2025.

The second-generation Brilliant control panel, unveiled in May 2025, lands like a statement of intent. Dual-band Wi-Fi. An AI-optimized processor. A 5-inch touchscreen with four times the resolution of the original. A built-in camera with a physical privacy slider - a small design choice that says everything about how seriously Petrucci's team takes the trust problem in smart home technology. It works with Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple HomeKit. It replaces the light switch and everything else in the same wall gang box.

Then, just before CEDIA Expo in Denver in September 2025, Brilliant launched a Power over Ethernet version aimed exclusively at professional integrators. A single CAT5/6 cable carries both power and data. No licensed electrician required. Flexible mounting anywhere at eye level, not just over a gang box. Sold in 5-packs, only through authorized partners. The product is almost aggressively anti-consumer - there is no retail version, no Amazon listing. It is a deliberate signal that Petrucci has chosen the professional channel and intends to stay there.

Lisa Petrucci went to Columbia University. Then, in 2002, she co-founded CommerceFlow Inc. as COO - an early e-commerce venture that positioned her as someone who understood both technology and the commerce infrastructure around it. Four years later she was at Optiant, then Six Apart, the company behind blogging platforms Movable Type and TypePad, where she was a Social Media Solutions Executive at the precise moment social media was inventing its own vocabulary.

At Joyent, the cloud computing company, she led global marketing from 2010 to 2012 - a role that required translating highly technical infrastructure concepts into business value propositions. It is the kind of translation that later proved essential when explaining to homebuilders why they should pre-wire for in-wall touchscreens. Dun and Bradstreet came next, from 2012 to 2018, where she ran Global Alliances and Partnerships at the SVP level - six years managing relationships with enterprise partners, the kind of role that builds a specific kind of scar tissue around negotiation, channel management, and the patience required to close deals that take quarters, not weeks.

She joined Brilliant in January 2018. The company had just emerged from founding in 2016 and was building what would become the defining product of the in-wall smart home category. Four years as VP of Business Development gave her a ground-floor view of everything - customer complaints, installer frustrations, channel economics, competitive dynamics. When she stepped up to CEO, she wasn't inheriting a black box. She had built the machine.

August 2024 was a pivot point. Brilliant was acquired by Almeida Strategic Investments - brothers Evan and Michael Almeida - alongside Cullinan Holdings, owned by David Blum. The company emerged rebranded as Brilliant NextGen Inc. with Petrucci continuing at the helm and a mandate to rebuild around professional channels and the builder market. The acquisition gave the company a second act when many expected a closing curtain.

Then came September 2025: $9.7 million in fresh capital from Almeida Strategic Investments and Tyrod Taylor's Strategic Investments Fund. Tony Smalls - partner at accounting firm MGO and CEO of Smarthome Solutions - joined the board. The funding went directly into the second-generation product line, partner network expansion, and AI-driven feature development. For a company that had raised $70.7 million over its lifetime across 17 investors, the new round was less about survival and more about velocity.