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.
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Smart lighting company Nanoleaf has been acquired by OneRobotics, the parent company of SwitchBot. In an exclusive interview with The Verge, Nanoleaf CEO Gimmy Chu says the company will remain independent and that he and his cofounder and COO, Christian Yan, will continue to run it. “Nothing is changing operationally,” says Chu, adding that there are plans for product integrations between the two smart home companies.
The sale, which Chu characterized as “more of a merger,” will provide Nanoleaf with significant resources, including a cash infusion that will, among other things, help the company grow its team at its Toronto headquarters. It will also bring access to the manufacturing facilities and supply chain of the Chinese company, which has a market cap of over $2 billion. “This will enable us to make things at a larger scale, with bigger purchasing power to bring down costs for our customers and have tighter control over the supply chain and quality control,” says Chu.
Chu was reluctant to go into financial details, preferring to point to public filings. These show OneRobotics is paying about $40 million over two years to acquire Nanoleaf outright, and that Nanoleaf’s annual revenue is around $30 million, but it has operated at a net loss for the last two years.
“We’re of similar size and scale with different strengths and a lot of synergies. We’re both scrappy fighters.”
Chu says the decision to sell was not out of financial necessity but to help the company grow. “We weren’t in a position where we had to do this. I probably wouldn’t have done it if it didn’t feel right,” adding that the two companies have had a good relationship for many years. “And it does; it feels like a great partnership.”
Despite being around for over a decade, Nanoleaf remains a relatively small company, one that has struggled in recent years to keep pace with bigger competitors such as Philips Hue and Govee. “We’ve accomplished a lot; our light panels started a whole new category,” says Chu. “But as a small team we didn’t have a lot of resources, and we have always had more ideas than we can handle and the challenge has been how to execute them.” One example of this is that it took the company nearly eight years to bring a light switch to market. With OneRobotics behind them, Chu says they’ll have the resources to bring those ideas to life.
Nanoleaf recently announced that it is developing new products around embodied AI. Image: Nanoleaf
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