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Samsung Acquires SmartThings, A Fast-Growing Home Automation Startup

This article is more than 9 years old.

Samsung is making a big push into being the center of the smart home today with its acquisition of SmartThings, which allows people to sync up their connected gadgets onto a single smartphone app and hardware hub.

The company isn't releasing the acquisition price, but TechCrunch reported a $200 million pricetag when first caught word of the deal last month.

“From the beginning, our goal has been to make a platform every human being could use—and to make every home a smart home," said SmartThings cofounder and CEO Alex Hawkinson in phone call today. “This will help us reach a massive scale. We saw an opportunity to bring SmartThing's vision to hundreds of millions of customers.”

Founded in 2012, SmartThings told me a few months ago it was currently only in "tens of thousands" of homes, but growing at a quick pace of 20% new installations every month.

According to the two companies, SmartThings will operate as an independent company and will be moving from its home base of Washington D.C. over to Samsung's Open Innovation Center in Palo Alto. The Open Innovation Center acts as an investing arm and startup accelerator for U.S. companies that Samsung is interested in.

"While the company has been acquired by Samsung, being in the Open Innovation Center, the company will be kept at arms length away from Samsung," said Samsung executive vice president David Eun in a phone call. "We want to people to understand how important it is that they will stay independent. SmartThings will continue to work with its developer community and business partners. In the meantime, we'll be exploring ways to partner with them."

Just what exactly those partnerships between SmartThings and Samsung will look like has yet to be determined. But it's not hard to imagine how important it will be for Samsung to figure out how to better place its smartphones and electronics empire at the center of people's lives. Samsung already has a number of connected appliances. Now, Samsung could sync them up with the thousands of gadgets coming out almost every day. SmartThings' sole piece of hardware--its hub that talks to all of the smart gadgets in one central place--could also come pre-installed in any one of Samsung's electronics, such as its TV.

"Samsung is the biggest electronics company in the world, imagine what we could do to create rich experiences for the consumer," said Hawkinson.  "A big part of this could be on distribution. The more consumers we have, the more developers get excited."

Central to the SmartThings platform is its developer community who create the "smart apps" that allow these various devices to sync up and talk to each other.

Apple is also thinking along the lines of how to make its gadgets more embedded into its customers lives. It recently announced HomeKit, which allows developers to safely sync up connected gadgets up to iOS. And Google has its own plans with its $3.2 billion acquisition of  Nest at the start of this year.

David Eun insists that this acquisition doesn't have anything to do with moves its competitor Apple is doing. "Samsung has been thinking about this space for a long time. Now SmartThings can really put the jet fuel into our efforts."