GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
Smart lighting company Nanoleaf has been unusually quiet recently. While competitors such as Govee and Philips Hue have been pumping out new products and innovative features at an impressive pace, Nanoleaf has launched just a handful of smart lighting products in the last two years. There’s a reason for this lull — the company has been going through a “brand evolution” focused on wellness, robotics, and, of course, AI.
“The smart home is getting kind of boring,” says the ever-candid Gimmy Chu, CEO and cofounder of Nanoleaf, which he now doesn’t want me to call a smart lighting company. “Our brand needs to evolve to incorporate some of the other products that we’re going to be releasing.”
“The smart home is getting kind of boring.” — Gimmy Chu
Nanoleaf is best known for its customizable, interactive RGB lighting ecosystem, with products like its modular lighting panels and software that mirrors lights to what’s on your computer or television screen. It was an early adopter of Thread and Matter, and its smart bulb was one of the first Thread products to work with Apple’s HomePod Mini when it launched in 2020.
But Chu says open standards like Matter are leading to the commodification of smart lighting — as evidenced by companies like Ikea selling full-color smart lightbulbs for around $10 that work with every platform. This is something he and others predicted when Matter launched nearly four years ago.
Image: Nanoleaf Image: Nanoleaf Nanoleaf shared these images as teasers of what its move into AI and robotics will look like. Image: Nanoleaf
Chu sees generative AI as the next wave of innovation. For Nanoleaf the tech company, that means a focus on embodied AI, where the technology can exist in and interact with the real world. “It’s putting intelligence into hardware that actually does something useful,” says Chu, not just putting ChatGPT in speakers. “AI is a huge buzzword right now, but it’s a transformative technology that will change the way that everything works, including the products that we develop.”
While he is coy about specifics, he says they have at least three products launching this year around embodied AI. Images he shared show that these will be some sort of AI-powered toy, a desk companion, and a robotic microcontroller.
A blog post on the company’s site explains how it plans to use AI in “personalized and impactful” ways to simplify daily living and enhance creativity and learning, but it offers no concrete details about what this will actually look like. Chu would only share that one product is related to early childhood development. He also said that robotics will be a big part of the company’s future, but that it will take a while to get there.
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