Balancing the excitement of my third daughter being born and the stress of an MBA project due the same day came the origin of Inovelli. The project revolved around analyzing the smart home industry and the players within it.
It became clear quickly that many companies chose to rely on their big corporate brand names to sell high priced, basic products that all looked the same.
The idea of Inovelli came from the fact that I simply wanted to develop cool products for my house and I figured others would to. In fact, this would lead to the community driven brand Inovelli is today.
As a young startup, we had to compete against some of the largest companies who had what seemed like an unlimited marketing budget and stock.
However, we had a secret weapon which was the 1,000's of passionate smart home owners who rallied behind us and helped sculpt some of the most innovative firmware on the market. In fact, we found our CTO in the SmartThings forum, but that's a story for another day.
It wasn't long before we caught the eyes of investors and realizing our ultimate dream, which was to design our own hardware.
One of the first major milestones was receiving an investment from local Angel Investors. We went from a sole-proprietorship to an S-Corp and now had the means to innovate our hardware and hire on some full time help.
Our goal was to create switches that were aesthetically pleasing, modern, and offered full customization regardless of your setup. Something you'd be excited to show your friends, while keeping the spousal acceptance factor high.
We launched our Red Series switches that quickly became an instant success and won the, "Most Popular Smart Switch" as well as the, "Product of the Year" via the Hubitat community.
With the success of the Red Series came the ambition to go after the mass market. Couple that with the announcement of Matter and we decided the best path forward would be to pursue a Zigbee switch.
This allowed us to reach the same customer base as our Red Series, but also reach people who do not have a hub (Amazon Echo) and set us up for the eventual transition to Matter.
As we move forward, we will offer both the Blue and Red Series switches.
