By now, we’re all familiar with the Internet of Things: the collection of Internet-enabled “smart products” that connect to your smartphone to give you total control with just the swipe of a screen. From smart locks and smart lighting to smart water bottles and smart trash cans, IoT products have been captivating imaginations everywhere, from the pages of Kickstarter to the classrooms of Silicon Valley’s leading incubators, to the offices of some of the world’s most powerful VC firms.

It all sounds great in theory, but in practice, smart products on the market today are riddled with problems, from complicated setup processes and poorly designed apps that leave users scratching their heads, to unreliable software and security breaches that make functionality a nightmare.

The last thing the world needs is another “smart” lighting system. What it needs is the smartest lighting system — one that comes with all the bells and whistles that spark users’ imagination — plus the functionality and reliability that transform smart lighting from a novelty a few tech-savvy early adopters back on Kickstarter into a easy-to-use, must-have essential in homes across the US and around the world.

That’s the smart lighting solution we set out to build at Emberlight.

No smart home is complete without smart lighting, and Emberlight has created the smartest lighting solution yet.

Emberlight Socket offers all the features smart home users expect from a smart light, plus simplicity, security, reliability and affordability unlike anything the smart light industry has seen before.

Thousands of users came out in support of Emberlight during our successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, and customers have continued to preorder the Emberlight Socket through our website ever since.

But the home user market is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Emberlight’s vision for the future of smart lighting. We’re taking our industry-redefining technology directly to lighting manufacturers and OEMs, and paving the way for the next stage of smart home evolution.

Emberlight Socket offers all the features smart home users expect from a smart light. Turn lights on as you arrive home, or off as you leave. Adjust brightness to conserve energy — or to set a mood. Set timers to automate your lights while you’re out of town. Emberlight Socket plays nicely with iOS and Android. It’s modular, so you can add multiple users and control multiple lights. And it’s portable, so when you move, your Emberlight goes with you.

So with Emberlight Socket, you get all the great functionality you think of when you think “smart light” — plus a few “extras” we think smart light users will be excited to see:

Emberlight Socket is designed to be so simple even someone who’s never even heard of home automation could use it. Setup takes less than 30 seconds — there are no hubs to configure. And there are no fancy bulbs to buy, either — Emberlight works with any mix of incandescent and dimmable CFL or LED bulbs.

Emberlight connects to your phone using both Wi-FI and Bluetooth LE, so those annoying shortages and cutouts you get with other smart lighting solutions? Those aren’t happening here.

Smart lighting solutions on the market today can run you anywhere from a hundred to a couple thousand dollars, most of which have an expensive starter kit with a hub. Emberlight Socket, on the other hand, retails for just $39 - $49, making it the most affordable entry point in the market by a mile.

Emberlight’s software stack includes proprietary security measures to keep hackers at bay — making us the first smart lighting solution to make your security a top priority.

A great product is, well, great — but where a company really starts to take off is when they can pair the right product with the right audience. That’s where Emberlight's vision for lighting manufacturers comes in.

While other smart home companies are focused exclusively on getting their smart lighting products in front of consumers, a massive market is going completely overlooked: lighting manufacturers and OEMs.

Lighting manufactureres and OEMs around the world are looking for opportunities to bring their business into the 21st century with the intelligence and connectivity that today’s consumers expect from today’s lighting products. But building a great smart lighting solution is easier said than done. It takes a full team of full-stack software engineers, electrical engineers and UX designers, millions of dollars, and years of research and development before it can get to market (trust us, we’ve been there.)

OEMs that have tried to go the DIY route and bring their own smart lighting solution to market have fallen short time and again, falling into all the traps we mentioned earlier: clunky hardware, shoddy app design, security breaches and so on.

So that’s what we’re doing. We’re already working with leading OEMs from around the world, integrating Emberlight’s technology into their product offering, and we’re connecting with new potential customers all the time. For a full list of OEMs exploring their smart future with Emberlight, request access to the Business Plan tab of this profile! 

2015 has been a big year for Emberlight — we’re firing on all cylinders, from product development and manufacturing to IP and partnerships.

Before we dive whole into our latest developments, here are a few of the highlights: 

Emberlight has gone through over 20 prototype iterations, and 3 manufacturing test runs (EVT1, EVT2, DVT) with the support of Flextronics, and we are currently going through certifications. Starting in October, we ramped up manufacturing for our first 8,000 units, which we will start delivering to our early adopter heroes soon. On the software side, Emberlight has completed a fully functional software stack, including firmware, cloud infrastructure,and iOS and Android apps — hundreds of thousands of lines of code that are complete and ready to rock.

The Emberlight team has submitted a utility patent application covering the core aspects of our platform, including our unique, simple setup protocol and app-level security.

The tech media is already buzzing about Emberlight and what makes Emberlight Socket unlike any solution the IoT community has seen before. Here are just a few of the highlights:  

Through our hugely successful Kickstarter campaign and ongoing pre-sales through our website, Emberlight has already sold more than 7,000 units to over 3,000 early adopter customers, for a total of $360,000 in pre-sale revenue. We are currently sampling with 2 major retailers and a top hotel chain. We have completed functional prototypes for 3 OEMs, including a pendant, light switch, LED bulb and motion sensor.

We are already distributing Emberlight through Exelon Energy, a multi-billion-dollar energy company with access to more than 1 million residential customers, as well as Japanese company C020.

Emberlight has caught the attention of some of the leading tech accelerators in the world, and we’re proud to be graduates of both Flextronics Labs and Orange Fab. These groups only accept the best of the best into their programs, and their support is a powerful vote of confidence in Emberlight. Even more powerfully, both Flextronics and Orange have continued to invest in the future of Emberlight as we move our company forward.  

We’ve made some incredible progress already, and the momentum is building toward even bigger and better things to come.

Behind every great product, there’s a great team. At Emberlight, we’re proud to have assembled an all-star team consisting of everything from Silicon Valley veterans and electrical engineering wizards to design geniuses and marketing pros. Together, they bring together the perfect storm of talent, drive, experience and drive to bring the Emberlight vision to life.  

Atif was born and raised in Silicon Valley. He has a PhD in semiconductor devices and holds 16 patents issued or pending and is co-author on 37 publications, mostly focused on low power technology. Atif spent 8 years at Applied Materials and has worked with every global top tier chip manufacturer on their next generation mobile technology.

Gordon is a 15 year veteran of hardware engineering with a bachelors in EE from UCLA and masters in EE from USC. His background is diverse covering schematic entry, FPGA/ASIC design, all the way to board bring-up. He has built radar systems at Raytheon, night vision systems at Intevac, and microinverters at Enphase.

Kevin is an entrepreneur with a strong engineering and product background. Past work includes his role as an early engineer at Card.io (acq'd by PayPal), CTO at Breezy and CEO of CISimple which he sold in 2014. His passion is the intersection of challenging engineering problems and intuitive user experiences.

Levi is an experienced engineer with expertise in cloud software development. He has 18 years of software design and management, including key roles at Yahoo, Adify and Dynamic Signal.

Steve is a passionate problem solver who has spent the past two decades designing brand-defining product experiences. He was the designer behind the recent launch of Twitter Fabric. At Google, he focused on simplifying complex consumer & business products. He has designed product at Twitter, Google & Autodesk.

Kevin is a firmware and embedded engineering expert. He holds an EE degree from Cornell and has been developing firmware for 10 years, including Raytheon and Booz Allen Hamilton.

After studying physics at Oxford University Tony initially focused on scientific research, but moved on to business development roles, culminating in twelve years at Apple, where he led their worldwide solutions marketing team. He also held VP marketing roles at AOL, Nortel, TiVo and AVG, then consulted with a series of startups; helping them simplify and focus their marketing.

Lexii is a marketing creative with 6 years in Event, Product, and Social media marketing. She has assisted with coordinating and managing marketing campaigns for Procter & Gamble, and assisted with growth of smaller CPG brands on a national level.