Smart lighting company Nanoleaf has been unusually quiet lately. While competitors like Govee and Philips Hue are pumping out new products and innovative features at an impressive pace, Nanoleaf has launched a handful of smart lighting products in the past two years. There’s a reason for this quiet, as the company has been going through a “brand evolution” focused on health, robotics, and of course, artificial intelligence.
“The smart home has gotten kind of boring,” says Jimmy Choo, CEO and co-founder of Nanoleaf, which he now doesn’t want me to call a smart lighting company. “Our brand needs to evolve to include some of the other products we will be launching.”
“The smart home is getting kind of boring.”
-Jimmy Choo
Nanoleaf is known for its interactive and customizable RGB lighting system, with products like modular lighting panels and software that reflects lights of what’s on your computer or TV screen. It was an early adopter of Thread and Matter technology, and its smart bulb was one of the first Thread products to work with Apple’s HomePod Mini when it launched in 2020.
But Chu says open standards like Matter are commoditizing smart lighting – as evidenced by companies like Ikea selling full-color smart bulbs for about $10 that work with every platform. That’s what he and others predicted when Project Matter was launched nearly four years ago.
Image: Nanoleaf
Image: Nanoleaf
Zhou sees generative AI as the next wave of innovation. For tech company Nanoleaf, that means focusing on embodied AI, where the technology can exist in and interact with the real world. “It’s about putting intelligence into hardware that’s actually doing something useful,” not just putting ChatGPT into speakers, says Chu. “AI is a big buzzword right now, but it is a transformative technology that will change the way everything works, including the products we develop.”
Although he’s coy about details, he says they have at least three products launching this year around embodied AI. The images he shared show that this will be a kind of AI-powered toy, an office companion, and a micro-robot console.
A blog post on the company’s website explains how it plans to use AI in “personal and impactful” ways to simplify everyday life and enhance creativity and learning, but it doesn’t provide specific details about what that will actually look like. Chu will share that only one product is related to early childhood development. He also said that robotics will be a big part of the company’s future, but it will take some time to get there.
The other pivot is towards wellness products. Nanoleaf launched a red light therapy mask in 2025, which Chu says has become one of the company’s best-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. “This will include heating and massage/vibration settings,” says Cho.
Like much of the health ware market, consumer red light therapy falls somewhere between science and hype. Nanoleaf’s selling point is the price. Chu says she has been able to leverage her experience in LED lighting and supply chain to make these products more affordable than most current options in the United States.
Nanoleaf will continue to focus on smart lighting, even as it moves into other areas, Chu says. He says it still represents 80 to 90 percent of the business, and they plan to continue launching new form factors and upgrades. The company will attend the IFA technology fair in Berlin this fall, where it will launch several new products. “We are introducing support for Matter 1.4 soon, and we have another product, Matter 1.5, which we will launch this year,” says Zhou. “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 new lamp shapes, are easy for the company. “A lot of the innovation in home lighting and gaming lighting has been about creating connection,” he says. “It was all blood, sweat and tears to solve the topic and the material.” As an early adopter, Nanoleaf was particularly hurt by the delayed rollout of the standard. Today, Zhu wants to direct all RandD efforts towards new challenges.
Nanoleaf will remain a smart lighting company
One area of smart lighting he remains passionate about is making it accessible to artificial intelligence. All of Nanoleaf’s products have open APIs, and Zhu is keen that the code will eventually be open source. “This is the direction technology is going,” he says. “With our lighting products and with most smart home products, the more open they can be made, the more AI compatible they become.” 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 a technology company CEO. For tinkerers, developing new ways to control smart lights using AI can be a fun side project. But existing Nanoleaf customers may want the company to focus solely on innovating its ecosystem and bringing new features and functionality to its app.
The smart home is evolving in the face of artificial intelligence and in the wake of matter – a standard that, when successful, makes connected devices interchangeable. For companies like Nanoleaf, this means differentiation is more important than ever. I’m not convinced that building AI facilities and health tools is the answer here, but at least Nanoleaf is thinking big.
Correction May 8:Jimmy Choo said that open standards like Matter lead to… Commodification Of smart lighting, not CommodificationAs this piece mentioned previously.
