Nanoleaf bets its future on robots, red light therapy, and AI | The Verge
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Nanoleaf bets its future on robots, red light therapy, and AI
CEO Gimmy Chu says the commodification of smart lighting is behind Nanoleaf’s pivot.
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Nanoleaf teased a trio of new products focused on embodied AI as it looks to move its brand beyond smart lighting.
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Nanoleaf bets its future on robots, red light therapy, and AI
CEO Gimmy Chu says the commodification of smart lighting is behind Nanoleaf’s pivot.
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Smart lighting company Nanoleaf has been unusually quiet recently. While competitors such as Govee and Philips Hue have been pumping out new products and innovative features at an impressive pace, Nanoleaf has launched just a handful of smart lighting products in the last two years. There’s a reason for this lull — the company has been going through a “brand evolution” focused on wellness, robotics, and, of course, AI.
“The smart home is getting kind of boring,” says the ever-candid Gimmy Chu, CEO and cofounder of Nanoleaf, which he now doesn’t want me to call a smart lighting company. “Our brand needs to evolve to incorporate some of the other products that we’re going to be releasing.”
Nanoleaf is best known for its customizable, interactive RGB lighting ecosystem, with products like its modular lighting panels and software that mirrors lights to what’s on your computer or television screen. It was an early adopter of Thread and Matter, and its smart bulb was one of the first Thread products to work with Apple’s Home Pod Mini when it launched in 2020.
But Chu says open standards like Matter are leading to the commodification of smart lighting — as evidenced by companies like Ikea selling full-color smart lightbulbs for around $10 that work with every platform. This is something he and others predicted when Matter launched nearly four years ago.
Nanoleaf shared these images as teasers of what its move into AI and robotics will look like.
Chu sees generative AI as the next wave of innovation. For Nanoleaf the tech company, that means a focus on embodied AI, where the technology can exist in and interact with the real world. “It’s putting intelligence into hardware that actually does something useful,” says Chu, not just putting Chat GPT in speakers. “AI is a huge buzzword right now, but it’s a transformative technology that will change the way that everything works, including the products that we develop.”
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While he is coy about specifics, he says they have at least three products launching this year around embodied AI. Images he shared show that these will be some sort of AI-powered toy, a desk companion, and a robotic microcontroller.
A blog post on the company’s site explains how it plans to use AI in “personalized and impactful” ways to simplify daily living and enhance creativity and learning, but it offers no concrete details about what this will actually look like. Chu would only share that one product is related to early childhood development. He also said that robotics will be a big part of the company’s future, but that it will take a while to get there.
The other pivot is toward wellness products. Nanoleaf launched a red light therapy mask in 2025, which Chu says has become one of the company’s top-selling products. It has since added a red light therapy panel and wand, and will launch four new red light therapy devices to treat your face and body this year. These will “include heating, and massage/vibration settings,” says Chu.
Like much of the wellness gadget market, consumer red light therapy sits somewhere between science and hype. Nanoleaf’s selling point is price. Chu says it has been able to leverage its expertise in LED lighting and supply chain to make these products more affordable than most current options in the US.
Chu says that Nanoleaf will continue to focus on smart lighting, even as it moves into other areas. It remains 80 to 90 percent of the business, he says, and they plan to keep releasing new form factors and updates. The company will attend the IFA tech show in Berlin this fall, where it will launch several new products. “We’re rolling out support for Matter 1.4 shortly, and have another product that’s Matter 1.5, which we’re releasing this year,” says Chu. “So, we’re not going to slow down.”
But he says the hard work was in the underlying technology, and now new lamp form factors or bulb shapes are easy for the company. “A lot of the innovation behind home and gaming lighting was establishing the connectivity,” he says. “It was all the blood, sweat, and tears of getting Thread and Matter actually sorted out.” As an early adopter, Nanoleaf was hit particularly hard by the delayed rollout of the standard. Today, Chu wants to point all those R&D efforts at new challenges.
One area of smart lighting he is still excited about is making it more accessible to AI. All of Nanoleaf’s products have open APIs, and Chu is keen to eventually open-source the code. “That is the direction that technology is going. With our lighting products and with most smart home products, the more open that you can make it, the more compatible with AI it can be,” he says. Allow the user to customize their lighting to exactly what they need, he says. “That’s really the power of the internet of things.”
Chu’s enthusiasm for the next big thing is understandable for the CEO of a tech company. For tinkerers, developing new ways to control their smart lights with AI can be a fun side project. But Nanoleaf’s existing customers probably want the company to just focus on innovating its ecosystem and bringing new features and functions to its app.
The smart home is undergoing a major evolution in the face of AI and in the wake of Matter — a standard that, when successful, makes connected devices interchangeable. For companies like Nanoleaf, that means differentiation matters more than ever. I’m not convinced that building AI companions and wellness gadgets is the way to go here, but at least Nanoleaf is thinking big.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy Close Jennifer Pattison Tuohy Senior Reviewer, Smart Home Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
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