MIT Solve

Solution Overview

Solution Name

Connected Home

One-line solution summary.

Connected Home is a smart home startup that has a mission to empower people with information about their homes.

Elevator pitch

What is your solution?

Connected Home is a smart home startup. We design, assemble and produce both hardware (controller Wallee Z) and software (Connected Home App).

We connect a wide variety of home automation products (water leakage/ fire sensors, air quality monitoring, etc.) into our controller Wallee Z and help people manage them via our mobile/tablet Application.

Thus, we bring peace and comfort to our clients by sending them on-time mobile notifications on various downbreak cases and improve their home experience via our mobile app control.

What specific problem are you trying to solve?

We are trying to solve several problems:

1) People tend to forget to turn off their devices (such as iron and the lights). This may, unfortunately, lead to apartment fires and excess energy consumption. The world stats show that there are more than 5M apartment leakages happening every year, and every 25 person forgets (or thinks she forgets) to turn off the lights/ devices every day. By installing Connected Home, a person frees himself from these concerns and helps the World become more energy efficient.

2) Lack of information. Whenever you are out of your home, you worry about the security of your property. People fear burglaries, water leakages, etc. Post-Soviet Union countries still take leading positions in crime rates and more than 60% of the population in CIS countries live in 100+ years old apartments, which are subject to various down break cases. Our Notification system and remote app control solve these problems. Thus we empower people with information about their homes, no matter where they are, and let them control their homes from any point on the Earth [with Internet connection :)]

Who does your solution serve? In what ways will the solution impact their lives?

Right now our solution serves mostly the people, who travel a lot and are passionate about new technology.

Yet, we truly believe that every single person on Earth should be empowered with information about his or her home. We want to bring information and automation to all homes, no matter your background and financial situation.

What steps have you taken to understand the needs of the population you want to serve?

We just completed our Customer Development Analysis, which was designed to understand our clients' pains and needs. We have identified that:

1) The water leakage problem is really a huge problem. So we integrated water shut-off valve into our Smart home and App so that people can shut-off the water remotely. As a result, we were able to prevent over 30+ apartment leakage cases. We are super happy about it!

2) In terms of product quality, we realized that sometimes our customers forget that they have a smart home. This idea helped us build several new reminder-like features for our App, which we believe will resolve this problem for our customers.

Which aspects of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?

Other: Addressing an unmet social, environmental, or economic need not covered in the four dimensions above

What is the unmet need that your solution tried to address? Why is it important?

People lack on-time, valid and live information about their homes. They worry about their homes when they are out, and they cannot control it from the outside. Connected Home resolves this issue.

Our solution's stage of development:

Growth: An organization with an established product, service, or business model rolled out in at least one community, which is poised for further growth

Explain why you selected this stage of development for your solution—in other words, what have you accomplished to date?

As for now, we sold more than 1500 smart homes in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan markets. We are planning to identify the specific needs of other (not similar to our region) markets, fit our product to that particular region and expand globally.

Where our solution team is headquartered or located:

Nur-Sultan, Казахстан

Team Lead:

Zarina Abilmazhinova