LG Electronics stated on Wednesday that it has acquired an 80% stake in Dutch good house platform agency Athom, with the remaining 20% to be purchased within the subsequent three years.
The South Korean house equipment maker stated it plans to combine Athom’s Homey platform which affords intensive connectivity that hyperlinks home equipment, sensors, and light-weight units, with its personal generative AI-enabled LG ThinQ platform.
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This may permit LG to achieve “deeper insights” into prospects’ way of life and utilization patterns that may, in flip, allow prospects to create a customized surroundings tailor-made to their preferences of their “AI properties”, it stated.
Based on LG, Athom affords its open good house platform Homey that connects with house home equipment and IoT units. Since launching in 2014, Homey has gained tons of of 1000’s of customers in Europe and it’s also out there in North America, Singapore, and Australia, LG stated.
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Athom’s flagship service Homey Professional can join over 50,000 units, together with these from companions Philips Hue and Ikea, via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Z-Wave, Matter, Thread, and different wide selection of connection strategies, the South Korean house equipment maker stated.
The Homey App Retailer additionally affords roughly a thousand apps based mostly on collaboration with different firms and the Homey neighborhood that continues to develop the open platform, LG stated. This implies extra third-party units and companies might be built-in into LG’s house equipment ecosystem, it stated, and it plans to proceed strategic investments into platform-based house equipment options comparable to webOS commercial platform and AI house.
LG affords all kinds of {hardware} we discover within the house, from TVs, washing machines, fridges, and others. Since launching its webOS TV platform in 2021, it has been eager to capitalize on this extensive portfolio by connecting these units via software program for brand spanking new income streams aside from strict {hardware} gross sales. Considered one of its newest pushes is free ad-supported streaming channels supplied on its TVs.
The acquisition of Athom exhibits that it additionally desires to find software-based enterprise fashions, by having the AI-enabled LG ThinQ platform hook up with extra units, in different home equipment via the chance introduced by the latest AI growth.