Samsung acquired SmartThings for a reported $200 million in a bid to have a bigger presence in the home automation space. SmartThings will remain independent, however, under the leadership of Founder and CEO Alex Hawkinson.
SmartThings has offices in San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and Minnesota and all 55 employees from these offices will be moving to Palo Alto in California where the Samsung Open Innovation Center (OIC) is located. Headed by David Eun, a former AOL and Google exec, the OIC is focused on developing services and software innovation. Most recently, it helped launched Terrain, an app that features a list of cards that can be used for a variety of shortcuts on a device.
"SmartThings has created a remarkable universe of partners and developers and now has the most engagement of any smart home platform in the world. Connected devices have long been strategically important to Samsung and, like Alex and his team, we want to improve the convenience and services in people's lives by giving their devices and appliances a voice so they can interact more easily with them," said Eun. He adds that Samsung is committed towards keeping SmartThings' open platform open while fostering explosive growth as the company's newest partner.
Samsung is already a big player in the world of mobile devices but the acquisition will help it improve upon its Smart Home efforts which may be able to pad some of the effects it's feeling because of performance setbacks from the previous quarters. The company is already working on linking appliances at home with the help of Tizen but it looks like Tizen can learn a thing or two from SmartThings.
"We believe that there is an enormous opportunity to leverage Samsung's global scale to help us realize our long-term vision." wrote Hawkinson in a blog post about the acquisition. While SmartThings will remain independent, it will be working with Samsung which drastically expands the kind of support it will need to develop products that will accommodate all devices and applications, expanding SmartThings developer base to enhance the program.
While it appears that Samsung has more to benefit than SmartThings from the acquisition, the latter also has a lot to gain now that it has a lot more resources at its disposal, allowing it to deal better with competitors. SmartThings started out as a Kickstarter project in 2012, since then sourcing more than $15 million in funding from various investors.
