Vivint Smart Home (Vivint, Inc.) announced a $100 million equity investment co-led by lauded tech investor Peter Thiel and investment firm Solamere Capital LLC. As an increasingly familiar name in the smart home space, this strategic investment will help Vivint manage growth and innovate product lines. 

Vivint offers a custom platform for home automation and monitoring, with integrated smart home products that include smart door locks, an award-winning smart thermostat, security cameras, doorbell cameras, local cloud storage as well as door and window sensors. To provide customers with the best smart home solution, Vivint offers more than connected home hardware, as products come with in-home consultation, professional installation, as well as support from its Smart Home Pros and 24/7 customer care and monitoring.

Vivint has also integrated into its systems leading smart home products such as the Amazon Echo and Nest Labs, Inc.’s Learning Thermostat.

The smart home market is expected to reach $38.5 billion by 2020, and Vivint is pegged as one of the segment’s largest and fastest-growing companies in North America.

Why Vivint smart homes?

A recent study conducted on almost 1,300 U.S. consumers revealed that eighteen percent are likely to purchase a smart home appliance or device in the next 12 months. According to the survey, 63 percent of the respondents cited family safety as the main reason for investing in smart home devices, while 54 percent cite convenience features such as remote controlling of lights and other connected devices as the reason for joining the smart home revolution.

This desire for security services has presented a channel for many to enter the smart home space, including Vivint. With a background in home alarm systems, Vivint understood the early opportunity of adding services to home infrastructure, a path taken by top providers including Comcast, AT&T and ADT. With such established rivals, what makes Vivint different?

Proximity to the end user has been central to Vivint’s customer acquisition and retention strategy, using promotions and door-to-door sales as ways to witness user experiences firsthand. Vivint’s also seen substantial growth since launching its highly personalized Sky service, stitching together its product functions under a central smartphone app according to user lifestyle. The machine learning necessary to drive Sky is a worthy chance to glean actionable insight into active user patterns. Both of these inroads to customer behavior lend to market research, product development and can ultimately support data exchange as a business-to-business transaction.

“It is important to make sure we’re relevant to consumer space — people have homes and don’t buy them every year,” explained Vivint CTO Jeremy Warren. “Many have been built 50 years ago. We’re always thinking in terms of the real world and real customer space — not designing for the future home of tomorrow, but the actual wiring they have, with the actual Wi-Fi performance, with the type of building materials, and how it impacts radio performance and device placement.”

Mellisa Tolentino contributed to this article.

Photo by eileenmak