There’s no shortage of innovation in the smart home market. Now two of the top companies in that sector are teaming up to nurture the ideas they think will shape the home of the future.

Icontrol Networks, Inc. the software platform behind Time Warner Cable, Inc.’s home automation suite, today announced a partnership with crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, Inc. that aims to recruit smart home startups for its OpenHome Labs incubator program. Claiming to manage 22 million sensors and devices for the backend of smart home services, Icontrol has an extensive distribution network of businesses all hungry for new products. And with 12,000 campaigns at any given time, Indiegogo has a wealth of initiatives from which Icontrol can recruit for its new incubator.

Also launched today, OpenHome Labs provides mentorship and funding opportunities for promising startups, as well as certification on Icontrol’s own platform. Certification is an important on-ramp to the smart home market’s commercial opportunities because it leverages Icontrol’s ecosystem to place startups in retail environments and other distribution channels.

For interested startups, this new partnership boils down to an added resource on Indiegogo’s crowdfunding network. While an application is required, the platform is open to any smart home startup. And, according to Icontrol, the application process “costs next to nothing.”

The costs involved with participating in OpenHome Labs depend on the startup and its product, as each requires different licenses and certifications. For example, a startup looking to work with Zigbee’s protocol would need to pay associated licensing fees. Icontrol is consolidating the various aspects of establishing a smart home startup to “provide a professional, scalable way to manage” the process, said program leader Jason Domangue, the vice president of ecosystem development for Icontrol.

Good vibes make great partners

For Icontrol, the decision to partner with Indiegogo was an easy one. After meeting Indiegogo’s lead for tech and hardware Kate Drane at the SxSW Festival earlier this year (see my SxSW interview with iControl here – about eight minutes into the video, iControl discusses company goals for attracting developers to its platform), Domangue realized how many smart home startups looked to Indiegogo as a fund-raising platform.

“We reach out to these [startups] when they launch and believe we can help accelerate their technology and go-to-market strategies,” explained Domangue. He wants Icontrol to act as a good citizen for the Indiegogo ecosystem, helping select startups “get better funding and introduce them to the right buyers and service providers.” While Icontrol didn’t share any quantifiable numbers regarding expectations for how its partnership with Indiegogo will impact startups, Domangue made it clear this joint program can help Icontrol grow its catalog of smart home products to distribute and sell through its channel partners, and ultimately spell success for startups seeking venture capital and retail opportunities through the mentors provided by Icontrol.  

The two companies hit it off so well that Icontrol didn’t even consider other crowdfunding platforms, like the popular Kickstarter, or smaller players like Crowd Supply, Inc., Domangue admitted, saying there was no scientific approach to selecting a crowdfund. “I didn’t have an idea of where [the partnership with Indiegogo] was going to end up, but we worked well together. It’s been very organic and natural,” he explained.

But for a company like Icontrol, which is interested in nurturing smart home startups, Indiegogo may be a better recruiting ground than Kickstarter based on the number of startups with active campaigns. A search for “smart home” and “home automation” startups on Kickstarter delivered fewer than 65 combined results, while the same search on Indiegogo brought back more than 100 startups for each search term, broken down by categories such as Education, Design, Business and Health. Granted, Indiegogo is a more open platform than Kickstarter in that anyone can launch a campaign (Kickstarter employees must approve every campaign on its site). Its flexible funding option also circumvents any sense of urgency for campaigns, meaning that Indiegogo’s larger project portfolio may be due to still open, ongoing campaigns. (In contrast, Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing format limits the amount of time a campaign can run.)

However, the ultimate reach for campaigns also remains a point of differentiation between Indiegogo and Kickstarter, with a recent crowdfunding report showing that Kickstarter’s hardware projects are five times more likely to reach funding goals than Indiegogo campaigns.

On the hunt for acquisitions?

Whether or not iControl is interested primarily in smart home hardware projects, or even the likelihood of successful funding, Indiegogo remains the crowdfunding platform of choice for outreach through OpenHome, according to Domangue.  iControl already has experience working with Indiegogo, having acquired a former Indiegogo campaigner Piper. Created by Blacksumac, Inc., Piper is an all-in-one home security kit for smart home DIYers. It broadens the variety of products being moved through iControl’s distribution channels.

Working with top service providers like Netgear, Inc., ADT Corp. and Comcast Corp., iControl is becoming a well-positioned player to dominate the smart home software services market. Most recently, iControl landed a strategic partnership with Best Buy, Inc. to provide the software for the electronics retailer’s own smart home line, creating yet another channel for OpenHome startups to explore.

Can we expect to see more acquisitions as a result of iControl’s team-up with Indiegogo? Perhaps, said Domangue, but the bigger goal of the partnership is to “give us a better way to do due diligence.” Acqusitions “would be a nice outcome, but that’s not the main goal,” he explained. “We want to get as many devices on the OpenHome program as possible…so our catalog of devices grows.”

Proof in the pudding

Leveraging Indiegogo as a way to prove market demand for smart home products and services, iControl is expediting much of the recruiting process for developers to work with its APIs, devices to sell to other businesses through its catalog and the prep work involved in key acquisitions. For Indiegogo, the certified support of iControl extends hands-on, real-world resources to its startups.

Indiegogo campaigners are fearless in Drane’s eyes, and she hopes the partnership with iControl can make the startup process “a little less scary.”

“We have 12,000 campaigns at any given time — that’s a lot of people pursuing their dreams. The ones that really take the next level of prep with this iControl program set themselves up for success,” said Drane. She also shared her desire to learn from startups’ work with iControl, utilizing feedback and use cases as educational material for future campaigns.

photo credit: DonkeyHotey via photopin cc