Boulder energy monitoring startup Copper Labs has landed its first smart home partnership with Samsung to help users track their energy output in real-time.
Copper Labs, which traditionally sells to and through utility providers, has integrated its offering into Samsung’s SmartThings connected living application. With this partnership, consumers can monitor and manage the energy output of connected appliances in real-time.
While this is a deviation from Copper Labs’ utility customers, CEO Dan Forman said he was attracted to Samsung’s offering because of its ease of use.
“Putting into the hands of the consumers a really easy to set up integrated smart home control solution is really why we selected Samsung for our first partner,” he said.
He said the Samsung partnership will give consumers the energy data they need to make greener decisions, like automatically reducing usage during peak hours.
“We’re excited to partner with Copper Labs given their unique offering in the market and ability to unlock data that is valuable to our customers,” said Chanwoo Park, corporate VP and head of IoT Business group at Samsung Electronics, in a statement. “We are committed to enhancing the overall user experience, and as SmartThings Energy continues to expand, this integration further moves us into the demand management space with an integrated and differentiated solution.”
The partnership continues Copper’s 2021 momentum and comes months after the Boulder-based company announced an oversubscribed $2 million funding round led by National Grid Partners, the venture arm of utilities giant National Grid.
Copper had previously worked with the company on a gas demand response project in downstate New York that led to the investment. Forman said gas is becoming an increasing area of focus for his company and Copper is working locally with Xcel Energy on a deployment in Colorado’s Summit County.
With a growing list of customers and partners, Copper Labs has expanded its space in Boulder to nearly 10,000 square feet and brought on a team of eight full-time employees. Forman expects to hire two more to its sales team in 2022 and go out for a Series A funding in the middle of next year.
As it innovates in the energy monitoring space, Copper Labs is working with a “big broadband operator” to debut a neighborhood level version of its product next year. Rather than sending consumers a wireless meter reader as they currently do, the company is preparing to build its hardware into a utility pole that can monitor hundreds of homes on a single device.
Forman said this will reduce the company’s per-home hardware cost, remove the reliance on consumer Wi-Fi and reduce friction for customers looking to access Copper’s insights.
Additionally, Forman said the next big step for Copper Labs is to get their technology into utility partner devices.
“Over time we’d like to embed our patent pending firmware in partner devices, that already have the radios present that we need, to allow them to access the data they don’t have and get us some distribution to do what we do faster,” he said.
