Brilliant, a maker of smart home controllers and smart light switches, is cash-strapped. CEO Aaron Emigh confirmed in an exclusive interview with The Verge that the company has laid off most of its staff, closed its support center, and stopped selling its products. However, the company maintains its servers and existing devices will continue to work in customers' homes.
But exactly how long is the question Emi couldn't answer? “I hope so indefinitely, but ultimately it's out of my hands,” he said, adding that the company is in the process of selling assets, and that it has failed to raise a Series C round or make an acquisition. He explained that he was looking for a buyer. company. “(The company) will be sold. We have a number of interested parties and we plan to run a very quick bidding process to sell it,” Emi said.
“Everything is still working. Everything is still being monitored.”
Smart users started noticing something going on late last week. A person claiming to be a Brilliant reseller/installer posted that one of his girlfriends, a Reddit user, was unable to connect to the company. All of the company's products are completely out of stock both in the online store and on Amazon. YouTuber George Langabil also weighed in on the speculation, saying it was impossible to get customer support.
When The Verge spoke to Emig this week, he said he was working to resume customer support but would not sell new products until the company's future was secured. “We have removed everything with great care. We want to ensure a clear path forward for any product we sell.” He assured current customers: Everything is still being monitored. It is my hope and expectation that you will not notice anything changed as we move into new ownership. ”
Brilliant's smart home control panels, smart dimmer switches, and smart plugs work locally over Bluetooth mesh and with Brilliant's app.Image: Amazing
That's a very optimistic view. Even if you find a buyer, there's no guarantee you'll keep the lights on. And when Brilliant's servers go dark, whoever has these $400 smart switches wired into the wall is going to lose a significant amount of functionality. Emig said the smart switches will continue to control the lights that are wired to them, and the intercom functionality between them will work, but many will not.
You will no longer be able to control cloud-connected devices from the built-in touchscreen, use the company's smartphone app, add new devices to the system, or create or edit scenes you've set up. Emigh said that because some of the integrations are local (Sonos, Hue, LiFX, WeMo, Somfy, Hunter Douglas), they will continue to work, at least as long as the API is available. The built-in Alexa voice control will still work, but it's not a good idea to keep the Switch online due to the lack of support and updates. So in the end it's just a fancy light switch.
The Brilliant Smart Home Controller (left) combines a touchscreen panel with a physical dimmer switch to control wired lighting.Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge
For those unfamiliar, Brilliant has made a wired smart light switch that lets you control your existing lights and other connected devices through a touchscreen panel. These include Philips Hue smart light bulbs, Sonos smart speakers, Ring video doorbells, Schlage locks, Nest thermostats, and more. The smart home's control panel included Amazon's Alexa voice assistant, as well as a camera and microphone to act as a home intercom system.
Founded in 2016, Brilliant sought to solve two major problems in DIY smart homes. It's about making devices from different manufacturers work together in your home, and giving everyone in your home an easy way to control things like lights, locks, music, and more.
But Emi thinks they were too good, too soon. Emi said the company's failure, which had raised a total of $60 million over eight years, was largely because the smart home market didn't take off as quickly as expected. “If we had achieved a 20% year-on-year growth rate, the market would have been 4.3 times as large as it is today,” he said. “It was difficult to launch a new product category in a market that was weaker than expected.”
“It was difficult to launch a new product category in a market that was weaker than expected.”
Cost was also a big factor. The company's home control panels start at $399 and go up to $549 per switch. This price straddles the line between a DIY gadget and a professionally installed product. With a relatively limited list of integrations, Brilliant was unable to attract enough new customers to its hardware.
According to Emi, they were trying to lower the price, but in reality, they were preparing a next-generation device that would be cheaper, better, and more powerful. “It has four times the processing power, an AI processor for edge control, and on-device video analytics. It's a significant upgrade.”
However, macroeconomic factors such as tariffs and global supply chain stressors over the past decade have led Brilliant to raise prices rather than lower them. The cheapest panel, which currently sells for $399, originally sold for $249. Emi says she wanted to sell it for $199.
“Unlike larger companies, we couldn't afford to shorten our runway and lower our prices to avoid potentially going out of business years ago,” said Michael Williams, Brilliant's vice president of marketing. “Ongoing price competition in the hardware market has led consumers to expect unrealistic costs.”
Emigh also cited interoperability issues as a barrier to growth. They wanted to be platform independent, but that was difficult to solve. One of the examples he gave is voice control. “He had two voice assistants on board before the launch, but one company wouldn't allow him to launch with both working.”
So it came to market with built-in Alexa voice control but without support for Google Assistant. But unlike other companies that faced similar predicaments, Brilliant never gave its customers the option to choose one or the other. This is how Sonos got around that particular limitation in the first place.
Despite the startup's struggles, simply turning on sales and support without warning customers is a bad move. Emi says it's mainly due to his optimism. “Until the very end, we believed the acquisition would happen,” he said.
Emi says the company is still operating in the most cash-efficient manner possible and will continue to do so until the assets are sold, but essentially Brilliant no longer exists.
Emigh shared a common saying when startups burn out: “Startups often have the right product idea, but the timing in the market is wrong.” Brilliant may have been ahead of its time. The Verge previously wrote that smart homes need better control devices, and Amazon's recently launched Echo Hub is a similar product to the Brilliant (at less than half the price). But in the end, what killed Brilliant was that it was a very expensive product without enough features to back it up.
The fatal flaw in the product was that it tried to work with everyone when no one wanted to work with them, and ended up working with too few people. As the smart home market struggles to grow, major companies have changed tack. Interoperability is the entire founding principle behind Matter, the smart home standard backed by Apple, Amazon, and Google.
For Brilliant, Matter arrived too late and is too premature to be of much use as a current product. But with the right owner, this device could still be a great controller for your smart home. Of course, that's the best-case scenario. The worst case scenario is that people have expensive computers wired to their walls that do little more than turn on the lights.