Smart Home

Samsung Snaps Up Smart-Home Startup SmartThings

Director of the Entrepreneur Partner Studio

August 15, 2014 2 min read

Another smart-home startup has been gobbled up by a tech giant. This time, it wasn't Google doing the gobbling.

Washington D.C.-based SmartThings has agreed to be purchased by South Korea's Samsung. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though reports peg the deal at $200 million.

As part of the deal, SmartThings will continue to operate as an independent company within Samsung. Its employees are expected to relocate to a new company headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.

Rumors of the acquisition first leaked last month.

Founded in 2012, SmartThings created a mobile app that essentially allows people to control and monitor various Internet-connected appliances within their homest. The company says its open platform supports more than 1,000 devices and 8,000 apps created by a community of device makers, inventors and developers.

Prior to the acquisition, SmartThing had raised $15.5 million in venture capital from investors including Greylock Partners, Highland Capital Partners and Lerer Ventures, among others.

"We believe that there is an enormous opportunity to leverage Samsung’s global scale to help us realize our long-term vision," SmartThings founder and CEO Alex Hawkinson said in a post on the company's site. "While we will remain operationally independent, joining forces with Samsung will enable us to support all of the leading smartphone vendors, devices, and applications; expand our base of developers and enhance the tools and programs that they rely on; and help many more people around the world easily control and monitor their homes using SmartThings."

Google has also been hot on acquiring smart-home startups. In January, it bought Nest -- which manufactures smart thermostats and smoke detectors -- for $3.2 billion. Then in June, Google's Nest bought Dropcam, a maker of home-monitoring cameras. That deal was for $555 million in cash.

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