Useful Sensors Raises Seed Round to Finally Deliver on the Promise of Smart Devices

October 26, 2022

Buzzwords come and go in technology. We might be talking about the ‘metaverse’ and ‘generative AI’ today, but a decade or so ago it was all about ‘smart devices.’ The notion that hardware could easily respond to voice commands, motion or other ‘rules’ that make the objects (everything from laptops to lights to doors) better. Well what happened? A number of stumbling blocks including some daunting challenges at the chip-level. But the opportunity remains for some brilliant technologists to finally deliver on the promise, and create an affordable, easy platform for tinkerers, engineers and the world’s largest enterprises.

Introducing Useful Sensors, which Homebrew has backed alongside our friends at Amplify, Fika and other notable investors. Cofounder Pete Warden is well known for a variety of contributions to open source, Google’s TensorFlow and other notable projects. Reconnecting with him, and meeting his cofounder Manjunath Kudlur, reinforced our own beliefs that *someone* was going to revisit the largely unfulfilled potential of this market and break it open in a huge way. Now we have some skin in the game that it’ll be this team.

You’ll hear more about what they’re doing over time, but already there’s a $10 Personal Sensor available at sparkfun for your experiments.