By Lucas Haldeman, Founder and CEO
It goes without saying that for a founder, the closing of new investment from a financing partner is a reason to feel good as it signifies that someone else is as excited about what you’re trying to build as you are. And when you are a connected home startup and that financing partner is Amazon’s Alexa Fund, it’s a day worth noting.
We’ve Secured Funding from Amazon’s Alexa Fund to Help Us Turn Multifamily Communities into Connected Communities
What’s most exciting about our new relationship with Amazon Alexa Fund is its potential to open doors from the technical and product development perspectives. For any company trying to develop a smart home platform the path that Amazon has forged with its smart home product line, its software and developer kits, and the universe of Alexa-supporting smart home products is critically important. It’s safe to say that no company has been as aggressive as Amazon in building out a smart home ecosystem that increases consumer convenience and safety in everyday life.
With Amazon Alexa Fund as an investment and strategic technical partner, we’re ready to build off of Amazon’s momentum and bring that convenience and safety to multifamily housing environments like condos, apartments, townhomes and other high-density living communities.
As with any technology product, interoperability maximizes user experience and so in the months and years to come, we’ll be working with Amazon, its products teams like Ring, and its ecosystem of technology partners to ensure that a SmartRent community is easy to build and manage. This includes keeping an eye on new developments like Sidewalk, Amazon’s low-bandwidth, long-distance wireless protocol that it believes will outperform Bluetooth and WiFi for connected home environments. For high-density living communities, the availability of a longer-range protocol that suffers less interference from neighbors’ WiFi and other devices can only provide an even better user experience.
As one of the only companies in the technology industry that has developed a complete platform for community owners and their residents, SmartRent is working to connect hundreds of thousands of homes at a time (https://smartrent.com/news/smartrent-home-automation-50000-apartments/) and give every person who rents a set of technology amenities that their parents couldn’t have dreamed of. Together with Amazon Alexa Fund, the reality of empowering community owners to deliver those amenities seems a little closer.
Request more information from us about our partnership with Amazon Alexa Fund.