Solamere Capital, the Mass.-based venture capital and private equity fund established by Mitt Romney and son Tagg Romney, has joined PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel in a $100 million funding for Vivint, a company out of Provo, Utah, making smart home gadgets and software.
The $100 million is Vivint's first money in.
Vivint leads with a "smart security" pitch, advertising the ability to control your door locks and garage door from anywhere. It also has a doorbell camera and security cameras. And, the company told Business Insider it will sell you other people's devices, too--an Amazon Echo or a Nest Learning Thermostat, if you want to make that part of your smart home setup.
"We don't sell a piece of hardware and walk away," Vivint CEO and founder Todd Pedersen told BI.
So it's a little bit different from SimpliSafe, the Boston-based startup that built a substantial business before raising any outside capital. SimpliSafe, backed by Sequoia with a $57 million round raised in 2014, is designed to replace a traditional alarm system with an IoT-based solution that's much easier to install. As of last fall, it had reached 300,000 customers, suggesting a big bump in revenue since it disclosed $38.5 million in sales for 2013.
To sum up, smart home security systems, red hot right now. So is Utah, for that matter. An unlikely state, perhaps, but I keep hearing about companies located there, including Pluralsight, which acquired Smarterer for $75 million in 2014. Maybe we should start looking into the domain situation on ProvoInno.com...
