Luma and the Future of Home Wifi
I have something embarrassing to announce. My home wifi sucks. It is pathetic. Coverage is spotty or non-existent in parts of my house. When we have friends over, I need to go inside to change the Sonos playing outside. My wife calls me to let me know that the printer isn’t working. As the resident IT manager, it is somehow my job to fix this, but my knowledge goes as deep as unplugging and replugging in devices. I suspect at least some of you feel my pain. With Luma’s launch today of their “surround wifi” mesh router, I’m excited to finally be proud of my home wifi and give my notice as home IT manager.
With phones, tablets, PCs, TVs, speakers and more looking for an internet connection, wifi is the electricity of the internet era. My laptop doesn’t even have an ethernet port. Yet, unlike electricity, “connecting” does not guarantee a connection.These problems don’t just impact me or my family. The whole ecosystem is at the whim of bad wifi. One of the largest consumer electronics retailers stated that the primary reason connected home products are returned is bad wifi, and telcos have relayed that 50% of support calls relate to wifi issues.
The $9 billion home networking market underscores the demand for better wifi technology. Yet the home is a complicated operating environment with countless devices connecting with different demands, which affect range and performance at the same time. Layer in the complexity of keeping all this secure and you’ve got a giant headache for consumers who just want a simple, consistent and safe wifi system for their home.
Luma was not the first company we met attacking the home wifi market. Like any ripe opportunity, multiple teams are going after it and we made a point to meet as many as we could. It was the team’s credibility and vision that drew us into Luma. Mike and Paul are experienced leaders, having founded and sold multiple companies together since initially working together in 2000. They come from the enterprise networking and security world, so they’re accustomed to the requirements of large companies. Having worked together for so long, they move incredibly quickly.
This speed will be critical as this market gets increasingly competitive over time. Luma is one of the rare consumer hardware products to ship on time with only the capital raised during their seed round. Even with that lean of an approach, they’re shipping a product that performs better than competition at a price $100 less than comparable mesh products.
For consumers, this is a big win. Luma’s surround wifi system is not just easy to set up, but also easy to secure and configure for your whole family. And mesh networking is only the beginning. Once wifi is working, there are plenty of other ways the Luma team plans to improve the connected home experience. Being at the center of the network, the router is perfectly positioned to address this.
In order to continue to push the envelope in this market, we’ll need to hire the best team possible. The company, which is based in Atlanta, is already off to a strong start. They’ve got one of the most impressive teams you’ll find in a Series A company anywhere. The head of engineering, Anil, was VP of Engineering for AirWatch before VMWare acquired the company for $1.5B. Matt ran supply chain for Sonos before teaming up with Luma. And, most recently, we hired a great sales leader who will be announced in the coming weeks.
If you’re interesting in joining the Luma team, please get in touch. If you’re interested in retiring from IT manager, here is a link to purchase. Feedback is welcome and appreciated.
