Samsung In Talks To Scoop Up SmartThings For Around $200 Million
Google has Nest, Apple has HomeKit and Samsung has...SmartThings, we're hearing. The deal was completed for around $200 million dollars, though it might have been less according to one source. — (Update: The deal is not done yet, says another.)
Context & Ripple Effects
SmartThings was one of the crowdfunded darlings of the connected-home wave, and its momentum showed just eight months ago when it raised $12.5 million from Greylock and Highland to build out its hub-and-sensors platform. Now Samsung is reportedly negotiating to buy it for around $200 million — though TechCrunch's own sources disagree on whether papers have been signed.
If it lands, the logic is straightforward and widely echoed: Google bought Nest, Apple has HomeKit in iOS 8, and Samsung — the world's largest phone maker — would finally have its own smart home answer rather than watching rivals set the standards. The pickup across the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, ZDNet and others shows how much weight the market puts on who controls the living-room platform.
First-order effects
- Samsung gains an operating, developer-friendly smart home hub overnight instead of building one, plugging its biggest gap against Google's Nest and Apple's HomeKit.
- SmartThings' backers — Greylock and Highland, in barely eight months after their $12.5 million round — would be looking at a reported ~$200 million exit.
Second-order effects
- Google and Apple now have to defend developer mindshare on a third front: a Samsung-owned platform could bundle SmartThings' open SDK with Samsung's handset and TV distribution, raising the bar for HomeKit's certification-only approach.
- Third-party device makers choosing which ecosystems to certify against get another credible buyer, shifting leverage toward whichever platform ships the most hubs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, independent smart home startups become acquisition targets rather than long-term standalone businesses, with the phone and OS giants absorbing the hub layer.
- Samsung keeping SmartThings' open model intact — versus Apple's walled garden — would make cross-platform compatibility a competitive weapon, pressuring HomeKit and Nest to loosen their own terms or cede the neutral ground.
The trend: The smart home is consolidating from hobbyist kits into platform wars run by the consumer-tech giants, with acquisitions like this deciding whose ecosystem owns the hub.