smart-home
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Elina Vives Left the CMO Track - and Came Back With the Whole Business in View
After years selling beer, wearables, and light, Elina Vives chose operating responsibility over the tidy marketing ladder. At Chamberlain Group, that detour has become her advantage.
Adam Smithline Built a Smart Door. The Hard Part Was Learning When to Listen.
A ski-trip complaint became a smart pet door, then a long lesson in hardware, humility, and the expensive distance between a clean idea and a dependable product.
Derek Richardson Spent Six Weekends Rewiring His House. Then He Rewired the Business of Light
A fiddly home project gave an electrical engineer a useful obsession: make the light switch easier to install, easier to upgrade and almost boring to use. Eleven years later, Derek Richardson is still chasing the same elegant click.
Eric Adler Put a Speedometer on the Water Meter
A drought, three engineering students and one stubborn household mystery became Flume. Eric Adler's decade-long bet is that water changes when people can finally see it.
Sunny Han Has Spent 13 Years Making Strange New Light Feel Familiar
Before Nanoleaf’s panels became a familiar backdrop for gaming rooms and smart homes, Sunny Han had to explain a light bulb that looked like folded paper. Her career is a lesson in translating unfamiliar hardware into something people can picture in their own lives.
Andrew Sneyd Is Bringing Big-Game Marketing Into the Home
After helping Budweiser, Priceline and FanDuel turn attention into action, Andrew Sneyd has taken on a quieter but more intimate arena: the connected home. His playbook is built around art, science, discipline and moments people can join.
Takeshi Homma
Takeshi (Ted) Homma is the founder and CEO of HOMMA Group, a Palo Alto smart-home designer, developer and builder he started in 2016. Descended from a Japanese family with fifteen generations in the building trades, he spent years at Sony and Rakuten before setting out to build what he calls a 'housing version of Tesla' - turnkey homes with proprietary, AI-driven technology woven into modern architecture. HOMMA has delivered pre-configured smart-home communities in Portland and proof-of-concept units in Boston, and partnered with a Mitsubishi Corporation subsidiary to scale the idea.
Jim Johnson
Jim Johnson is the CEO of Gembah, an Austin-based product development and manufacturing platform that helps brands and entrepreneurs design, prototype, and source physical products from a vetted global network of factories and experts. A veteran hardware and technology operator, he earlier founded and ran uControl, a pioneer of interactive home security and smart-home platforms, then became a leader at iControl Networks after the two companies merged - scaling the business to more than 300 employees and deployments in over 3 million homes before its 2017 acquisition by Comcast and Alarm.com. An electrical engineer by training, Johnson pairs deep technical fluency with a track record of building, merging, and exiting technology companies.
Jochen Meissner
Jochen Meissner is a German-trained mechanical engineer turned technology executive with more than 25 years of experience running machinery and technology companies across Europe and the United States. After leading the printing-press maker Goss International as President and CEO, he founded and ran Setem Technologies, a Boston-area startup built on patented signal-separation algorithms for far-field voice control. When the British semiconductor company XMOS acquired Setem in 2017, Meissner became General Manager of the XMOS Boston office and joined the XMOS Board of Directors, where he continues to help steer the company's push into voice and AI-enabled audio processing.
Danny Mayer
Danny Mayer is the co-founder and co-CEO of Windmill, the design-led air care company often called 'the iPhone of air conditioning.' A Harvard economics grad who spent a decade in investment banking, private equity and health-tech leadership, he teamed up with his brother Mike and third-generation AC expert Ryan Figlia in 2020 to reinvent the unloved window air conditioner. Windmill launched to thousands of waitlist sign-ups within 24 hours and has since expanded into air purifiers, fans and a connected smart-air suite, raising a $5M Series A in 2024.
Jerming Gu
Jerming Gu is the Taiwanese founder and CEO of CANDY HOUSE, the company behind SESAME, the smart lock that clamps onto an existing deadbolt and turns a smartphone into a key. He started the company as a Stanford mechanical engineering master's student in 2014 with co-founder Jongho Shin, then turned a 3D-printed dorm-room prototype into a Kickstarter phenomenon that raised roughly $1.4 million in 2015. After a decade building a dominant smart-lock business in Japan - including funding from ITOCHU and a strategic alliance with lock maker MIWA - he relaunched CANDY HOUSE in the US and Canada in 2025 with a lineup spanning SESAME 5, face recognition, palm-vein biometrics and Matter-compatible hubs.
Janell Fischer
Janell Fischer is VP of Global Retail Marketing and Customer Experience at Google, where she has spent over a decade architecting how the world's most valuable tech company shows up in physical spaces. She pioneered Google Shops — the immersive store-within-a-store concept launched inside Best Buy Canada in 2016 — and has since expanded Google's retail footprint through partnerships with b8ta and other retailers. Before Google, she held Director-level retail marketing roles at Apple and Sony Electronics, making her one of the few executives who has shaped the physical retail presence of all three consumer electronics giants.
John Martin
John Martin co-founded Level Home in 2016 with the idea that the best technology is invisible - literally. After a snowstorm stranded him and his family at Lake Tahoe without keys, he set out to reinvent the deadbolt from scratch. The result: Level Lock, a smart lock engineered to hide entirely inside the door, preserving home aesthetics while adding full smartphone control. Martin spent decades across Microsoft, Starbucks, Apple, and Nokia before building Level into a $171M-funded company that was ultimately acquired by ASSA ABLOY in 2024 - a hardware giant recognizing that the future of the lock is invisible.
John Grady
John Grady is the CEO of Ayla Networks, a San Jose-based IoT and smart home software platform that powers over 15 million connected devices and 250 billion annual transactions for brands like SharkNinja, De'Longhi, Canadian Tire, and Schneider Electric. A Boston College and Indiana University Kelley School of Business graduate with 20+ years in technology sales and operations, Grady rose through roles at Brown Brothers Harriman, Covad Communications, Pace PLC, ChargePoint, and Solar Mosaic before joining Ayla in January 2022 as Head of Global Sales and ascending to CEO in 2024. Under his leadership, Ayla was ranked the #1 US-based Smart Home Platform by ABI Research and announced a major Google Cloud partnership in April 2025.
Lisa Petrucci
Lisa Petrucci is the CEO of Brilliant NextGen Inc., the San Mateo-based company behind the leading in-wall smart home touchscreen control panels trusted by builders and property managers across North America. A veteran of Dun & Bradstreet, Joyent, and Six Apart, she joined Brilliant in 2018 as VP of Business Development before stepping up to lead the company through a pivotal acquisition in 2024 and a $9.7M funding round in 2025. Under her leadership, Brilliant has launched a second-generation AI-ready control platform and a Power over Ethernet professional line, cementing its position at the intersection of smart home hardware, multifamily real estate, and connected living.
Scott Cahill
Scott Cahill is the co-founder and former CEO of LEXI, an intelligent enterprise IoT platform headquartered in Lebanon, Ohio. He built the company from a smart lighting passion project into a universal wireless building automation system that claims up to 90% cost savings over competitors. Over 7.5 years he led LEXI through a $2.6M seed round, a $3.5M pre-Series A, and multiple equity crowdfunding campaigns, accumulating $5.5M raised and a $30M valuation by 2024. In 2024 he handed the CEO role to Hans Bukow to accelerate LEXI toward IPO, while remaining as an advisor.
Shane Dyer
Shane Dyer is the CEO and co-founder of Irrigreen, an Edina, Minnesota-based company reinventing residential lawn irrigation with AI-powered digital sprinkler systems that use up to 50% less water than conventional setups. A Stanford-trained computer systems engineer and serial entrepreneur with three company foundings under his belt - including Arrayent, an IoT platform acquired for $37M - Dyer applied inkjet printing precision to lawn sprinklers, creating a 'water printing' system now deployed across 300+ installation partners in nearly every U.S. state. Irrigreen raised a $19M Series A in April 2025, bringing total funding to $35.89M, and has saved 400 million gallons of water for customers to date.
Arch Rao
Arch Rao is the Founder and CEO of SPAN, a San Francisco-based clean energy hardware company that reinvented the home electrical panel. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer and former Tesla Energy leader who helped launch Powerwall, Powerpack, and SolarCity products, Rao founded SPAN in 2018 with a singular mission: rapidly decarbonize American homes by making the century-old electrical panel smart. SPAN's intelligent panels enable circuit-level control, real-time energy monitoring, solar and battery integration, and grid demand response - turning a neglected utility box into the command center for home electrification. With over $522M in total funding and backing from Wellington Management, Fifth Wall, Robert Downey Jr.'s FootPrint Coalition, and Amazon's Alexa Fund, SPAN is building the grid-edge infrastructure layer for the coming decades of home electrification.
Nick Weaver
Nick Weaver is the co-founder and CEO of eero, the company that reimagined home Wi-Fi with the world's first whole-home mesh networking system. A Stanford-trained engineer turned McKinsey consultant turned venture capitalist, Weaver quit Menlo Ventures in 2014 to fix the router - a problem he'd been wrestling with since he was a kid setting up networks for neighbors in Chicago. He sold $2.5 million of product in two weeks, landed in 600 Best Buy stores within two years, and delivered eero to Amazon in a $97 million acquisition in 2019. He now leads eero as VP of Devices & Services under Amazon, where the mission is unchanged: make the technology in homes just work.