Brilliant, which makes a $199 smart home hub, raises $21M Series A led by August Capital
Scott Martin / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
Brilliant's 2017 raise put it squarely in the consumer-hub camp: sell homeowners a $199 panel that controls their existing devices, backed by [[a:|August Capital]]'s $21M Series A. The rest of the coverage shows where the category's money went next.
Two years later, Level Home skipped the hub entirely, emerging from stealth with $71M and a $249 lock that bolts onto existing deadbolts, while SmartRent built the same automation stack for building owners instead of individual buyers — raising through a Series C and then going public via SPAC at a $2.2B valuation.
First-order effects
- August Capital takes a consumer-hardware position, giving Brilliant fresh capital to push its $199 hub into a market where rivals are choosing different entry points into the home.
- Brilliant now has the runway to prove the hub thesis before the retrofit and property-manager approaches — Level Home's deadbolt lock, SmartRent's building-owner contracts — pull buyers and developers elsewhere.
Second-order effects
- Competitors' funding paths diverge from Brilliant's: Level Home raises more than three times Brilliant's round on a single-device retrofit, and SmartRent scales through multifamily channels, pressuring hub makers on both distribution and price per device.
- Property-technology investors gain a proven alternative buyer — the building owner, not the renter — which is exactly the customer SmartRent courted from its Series B onward.
Third-order effects
- If the funding pattern holds, the standalone consumer hub becomes a niche squeezed between retrofit devices that need no hub and B2B platforms pre-wiring whole buildings, with venture capital concentrating in the latter two.
- The structural question the corpus leaves open is whether hub makers can hold the consumer relationship once landlords and lock retrofits each own part of the smart-home stack.
The trend: Smart home venture capital is migrating away from standalone consumer hubs toward retrofit devices and property-owner platforms, leaving early hub bets like Brilliant's as the category's first-mover test case.