Sentient Home

Sentient Home Platform

Co-founder·2011–2013

Building automation cloud platform that later merged into Yonomi.

Sentient Home was an attempt to abstract away the complexity of building automation — treating the home as a programmable system rather than a collection of vendor silos. We built a cloud layer on top of local protocols before cloud-connected devices were mainstream. The technology was right; the market timing was early. Rather than fail outright, we merged the core platform and team into Yonomi, which became the vehicle to take the idea to scale.

Lessons learned

  • Platform abstractions only work when the underlying devices cooperate
  • Timing the market is as important as reading it
  • Merging is a valid outcome — not every startup needs to IPO