With Zonoff raising $3.8 million in new investment capital from venture capital groups Valhalla Partners and Grotech Ventures, the smart home industry seems to have just added another major player.
Zonoff is a smart home technology company founded in 2011, in part by CEO Mike Harris, who has been in the Internet-connected home device market for several years, selling his previous company AnySource Media to DivX in 2009.
Zonoff’s main business is, like many smart home technology companies, helping all of the parts of your home –– home entertainment systems, home security systems, heating and cooling thermostat systems, etc. –– all talk to each other, to make your life easier.
So far they’ve developed and operated systems for clients like Somfy’s TaHoma.
“This investment validates our approach in building a software platform for our channel partners, who are typically large, consumer-facing companies that have deep and trusted ties with consumers,” Harris was quoted on the Zonoff blog.
Valhalla General Partner Kiran Hebbar is excited about Zonoff and the role that they could play in the rapidly growing smart home industry.
“Whether you call it ‘connected home’, ‘smart home,’ the ‘Internet of things’ or ‘M2M’ (machine-to-machine), this is shaping up to be a massive market, and Zonoff has the ideal leadership, team and experience to scale up for this global opportunity,” Hebbar said. "Valhalla is excited to support Zonoff as they continue to build their footprint. The senior management team has deep and proven experience in delivering software platform solutions to the consumer electronics industry, which we believe is key in this fast-growing market. In fact, ... this team has built and shipped more than 500 million consumer electronic devices worldwide over the past 15 years, and have also built and scaled Cloud services that integrate with embedded devices for millions of users worldwide.”
The Pennsylvania-based company currently employs 18 people, but, with this new capital, the company is already working on expanding, according to Bob Cooper, chief marketing officer at Zonoff.
“With the new investment, we’ll be growing our technical staff as well as our support team and infrastructure,” Cooper said to VentureBeat.
