The Connected Home
Noon Home Redefining How We Experience Home
Will Lark and Annie Cheung founded NOON Home with the goal of changing the way people live by transforming the light that surrounds them. Their idea was to take an object that’s familiar and easily accessible to everyone (the light switch), and make it capable of doing things it has never done before — enhancing the home atmosphere, activities and our lives.
On Wednesday, December 6th we hosted a private dinner, featuring Noon Home. CEO Erik Charlton and founder Annie Cheung will discuss how they're changing the way we experience the home starting with lighting. Founding General Partners, Bill Malloy and Brian Nugent will lead a conversation around how the connected home will transform over the coming years and decades.
Sway Ventures Investment in Noon Home
At my core, I’ve always been a product guy. Admittedly, I’m somewhat of an early adopter, but the driving force behind my interest in advancing the connected home space has always been fueled by my passion for architecture. Most recently, while designing a mountainside residential community in South Carolina, I discovered firsthand the soaring costs and complexities around integrating smart devices for lighting, climate control, security, and even kitchen appliances. I realized quickly, we live in a world where we are no longer are satisfied with smart phones, we now demand smart homes, and consumers expect wifi devices to enable a more convenient, comfortable and connected lifestyle. However, there are still a lot of critical areas in our home waiting for great products to bring them into this brighter, more connected world.
That’s why I am delighted to share the news that Sway Ventures invested in Noon Home. They are coming out of stealth and announcing their first product, the Noon Lighting System, and I couldn’t be more proud of the team on reaching this important milestone. The Noon Lighting System is now available for order on their website, select Best Buys, Home Depots, and B8T.
Noon was created with the goal to improve our daily experience by looking at how we interact with our home. Using layered lighting, Noon is able to transform your home using a combination of ambient lighting for general illumination (so you can walk around your home without tripping over furniture); task lighting to aid in the performance of specific activities (such as cooking or reading); and accent lighting to highlight a painting on the wall or to draw attention to an architectural feature.
“Not a lot has been done to innovate the light switch, but there is one in every room. You have a lot that can go through the light switch. Back when we invested in Nest the basic technology needed for innovation in the lighting category just was not there.”
— ROB CONEYBEER, SHASTA VENTURES
No matter what type of existing light bulbs you have — the average home has over 50 light bulbs — The Noon Smart Lighting Systems switches will sense the types of bulbs they’re controlling (incandescent, LED, fluorescent, low voltage, etc.), and can automatically create the type of layered lighting that would normally require the skills of a professional designer.
“As a company of creators, we seek out a product’s core essence and work tirelessly removing the non-essential. Every feature, every design detail and every customer interaction should grow out of a unified vision of the product’s core.”
— ERIK CHARLTON, CEO AT NOON
The lighting system itself is designed with care and craftsmanship to fit into and enhance your home. All existing dumb or smart light bulbs can be adjusted with one-touch, from the Room Director’s glass touch-screen OLED display. The Noon Smart Lighting System doesn’t take up any more space than your current switches. It looks fantastic in every installation I’ve seen…in fact, we’re even installing it in our office in Jackson Square. Like most smart devices, Noon Home gets smarter and will evolve over time, Noon’s smart features include Night Light, which turns on ultra-low light when you walk by the Room Director, and Vacation Mode, which “plays back” learned patterns to mimic the homeowners actual behaviors. Noon also supports voice activation with Amazon Alexa.
When I first met Noon Home founders Annie Cheung and Will Lark, I knew they were exceptional, and it was apparent how much they cared about building a product that mattered. Their team knew the challenges of starting a software-driven hardware company, and the challenges associated with building a lighting system that could integrate elegantly with legacy systems. They knew how much people cared about their homes and would only change their lighting system if it could remove complexity and humanize innovation. To make this happen, Annie and Will have recruited the brightest team of consumer hardware experts, led by CEO Erik Charlton, and recruited a team of 60 employees, consisting home product engineers, and designers from market-defining tech companies including Nest, Apple, Roku, GoPro and Yves Béhar.
I am honored to partner with the Noon Home team and sit on their board of directors. There are big opportunities ahead in creating products that people bring into their homes and lives, and use many times per day. Lighting is one of those rare products that we interact with more than once every day. Noon Home has been in design and testing for a few years and today, they are ready to help everyone share their spaces with the people in their lives.
