Sensible lighting firm Nanoleaf has been unusually quiet just lately. Whereas rivals equivalent to Govee and Philips Hue have been pumping out new merchandise and modern options at a powerful tempo, Nanoleaf has launched only a handful of good lighting merchandise within the final two years. There’s a purpose for this lull — the corporate has been going via a “model evolution” centered on wellness, robotics, and, after all, AI.
“The good house is getting form of boring,” says the ever-candid Gimmy Chu, CEO and cofounder of Nanoleaf, which he now doesn’t need me to name a wise lighting firm. “Our model must evolve to include among the different merchandise that we’re going to be releasing.”
“The good house is getting form of boring.”
— Gimmy Chu
Nanoleaf is greatest recognized for its customizable, interactive RGB lighting ecosystem, with merchandise like its modular lighting panels and software program that mirrors lights to what’s in your laptop or tv display screen. It was an early adopter of Thread and Matter, and its good bulb was one of many first Thread merchandise to work with Apple’s HomePod Mini when it launched in 2020.
However Chu says open requirements like Matter are resulting in the commodification of good lighting — as evidenced by corporations like Ikea promoting full-color good lightbulbs for round $10 that work with each platform. That is one thing he and others predicted when Matter launched almost 4 years in the past.
Picture: Nanoleaf
Picture: Nanoleaf
Nanoleaf shared these photos as teasers of what its transfer into AI and robotics will appear like. Picture: Nanoleaf
Chu sees generative AI as the following wave of innovation. For Nanoleaf the tech firm, which means a give attention to embodied AI, the place the know-how can exist in and work together with the true world. “It’s placing intelligence into {hardware} that truly does one thing helpful,” says Chu, not simply placing ChatGPT in audio system. “AI is a big buzzword proper now, but it surely’s a transformative know-how that may change the way in which that all the things works, together with the merchandise that we develop.”
Whereas he’s coy about specifics, he says they’ve at the very least three merchandise launching this yr round embodied AI. Photographs he shared present that these will likely be some form of AI-powered toy, a desk companion, and a robotic microcontroller.
A weblog publish on the corporate’s website explains the way it plans to make use of AI in “personalised and impactful” methods to simplify day by day residing and improve creativity and studying, but it surely affords no concrete particulars about what this may truly appear like. Chu would solely share that one product is said to early childhood growth. He additionally stated that robotics will likely be an enormous a part of the corporate’s future, however that it’ll take some time to get there.
The opposite pivot is towards wellness merchandise. Nanoleaf launched a purple mild remedy masks in 2025, which Chu says has change into one of many firm’s top-selling merchandise. It has since added a purple mild remedy panel and wand, and can launch 4 new purple mild remedy gadgets to deal with your face and physique this yr. These will “embrace heating, and therapeutic massage/vibration settings,” says Chu.
Like a lot of the wellness gadget market, client purple mild remedy sits someplace between science and hype. Nanoleaf’s promoting level is value. Chu says it has been in a position to leverage its experience in LED lighting and provide chain to make these merchandise extra reasonably priced than most present choices within the US.
Nanoleaf will nonetheless be a wise lighting firm
Chu says that Nanoleaf will proceed to give attention to good lighting, even because it strikes into different areas. It stays 80 to 90 p.c of the enterprise, he says, and so they plan to maintain releasing new kind elements and updates. The corporate will attend the IFA tech present in Berlin this fall, the place it would launch a number of new merchandise. “We’re rolling out help for Matter 1.4 shortly, and have one other product that’s Matter 1.5, which we’re releasing this yr,” says Chu. “So, we’re not going to decelerate.”
However he says the laborious work was within the underlying know-how, and now new lamp kind elements or bulb shapes are straightforward for the corporate. “A variety of the innovation behind residence and gaming lighting was establishing the connectivity,” he says. “It was all of the blood, sweat, and tears of getting Thread and Matter truly sorted out.” As an early adopter, Nanoleaf was hit notably laborious by the delayed rollout of the usual. Immediately, Chu needs to level all these R&D efforts at new challenges.
One space of good lighting he’s nonetheless enthusiastic about is making it extra accessible to AI. All of Nanoleaf’s merchandise have open APIs, and Chu is eager to ultimately open-source the code. “That’s the course that know-how goes. With our lighting merchandise and with most good residence merchandise, the extra open that you may make it, the extra appropriate with AI it may be,” he says. Enable the person to customise their lighting to precisely what they want, he says. “That’s actually the ability of the web of issues.”
Chu’s enthusiasm for the following huge factor is comprehensible for the CEO of a tech firm. For tinkerers, growing new methods to regulate their good lights with AI generally is a enjoyable facet venture. However Nanoleaf’s current clients in all probability need the corporate to simply give attention to innovating its ecosystem and bringing new options and features to its app.
The good house is present process a significant evolution within the face of AI and within the wake of Matter — a regular that, when profitable, makes related gadgets interchangeable. For corporations like Nanoleaf, which means differentiation issues greater than ever. I’m not satisfied that constructing AI companions and wellness devices is the way in which to go right here, however at the very least Nanoleaf is pondering huge.
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