Shelly's tiny relays slip behind the switches you already own and quietly automate the house - no hub, no subscription, and a following of DIY installers who treat local control like a religion.
You may not recognize the name Jasco, but you have probably handled its work. The Oklahoma City company built a 50-year business by hiding in plain sight - behind familiar brands, ordinary household problems and an uncommon promise to give half of its owned-brand profits away.
The smartest thing in a connected appliance may be the infrastructure its owner never sees. Ayla Networks supplies that hidden stack - from firmware to cloud to app - for brands that want the benefits of IoT without surrendering the customer relationship.
CANDY HOUSE, Inc. is the consumer-hardware company behind Sesame, the retrofit smart lock that mounts over an existing deadbolt with adhesive tape and turns a smartphone, fingerprint, card, PIN or face into a key. Founded in 2014 by Stanford engineer Jerming Gu and famous for a 2015 Kickstarter that raised about $1.4M, the company built an open ecosystem around SesameOS - locks, touch and face readers, a coin-sized Matter hub, sensors and finger robots - aimed at making smart-home access affordable, rental-friendly and developer-open.