Canary raises $10 million for app-enabled home security

Canary raises $10 million for app-enabled home security

Khosla Ventures is among those that plowed funds into a startup that already attracted a lot of attention on crowdfunding site Indiegogo.

Canary's cylindrical networked home-security devices are designed to be easier to use than traditional alternatives. The devices send notifications to a smartphone if data from the camera, accelerometer, thermometer, or microphone indicates something is amiss.

Canary, a startup that hopes to reproduce with home security the success that Nest had with its app-enabled thermostats and smoke alarms, has raised $10 million in a first round of funding.

The funds came from Khosla Ventures, Bobby Yazdani, and seed-round investors including Two Sigma Ventures, Canary said.

The company also raised $2 million through crowdfunding at Indiegogo (it had planned to raise only $100,000, but evidently struck a nerve). The venture capital will mean Canary can hire more staff and push more quickly to develop its hardware and software.

Canary's technology pairs a mobile app with a cylindrical Net-connected device housing wide-angle camera, microphone, thermometer, and motion detector. It perches on a flat area to survey a room and sends alerts "when something doesn't seem right," according to its algorithms, according to co-founder Jon Troutman.

It's an example of an idea called the Internet of things -- an ever-broadening array of devices besides PCs and smartphones made possible by more cheap computing and network electronics. One particular focus of the Internet of things are networked sensors.

The devices cost $200 each -- you'll need several for larger homes -- and are due to ship starting in July.

Source: cNet