We’ve been through the top startups in EU and US reshaping the home automation industry and leading us to the smart-home of the future. Today we’ll provide a closer look to one of the most interesting startups providing product and software to make home automation easy and comfortable.

Dymotics is a Spanish startup providing a universal hub that turns your smartphone into a easy and unique smart-home remote control. These guys successfully launched a crowdfunding campaing on Indiegogo that ended in last November and involved many fans and supporters. They’ve got an awesome brand marketing and communication strategy while teaming up with established and well known players in the domotics industry like Fibaro. Here’s an interview you don’t want to miss out!

How was your idea born? How did you set up your startup and put together an effective team? Tell us your experience and the…daring steps of the beginning!

The truth is…the core idea came about in a funny way! Our CEO, Miriam Muros, is a cat lover, and has two at home. Both of them are quite laid back but whenever anyone rang the doorbell, the cats, quietly resting on her lap would jump out of their skin scared of the sound and would even scratch her to get away. It was a continuing problem. However on one such occasion Miriam saw the light. “I want the doorbell to ring on my phone. I want to answer it from my phone and I want to open the door without getting off the couch.” And so the main concept of Dymotics was created: to make your life easier. Furthermore, this idea would also help her grandma, a very independent woman with mobility problems. Miriam wanted to create a system which would allow her to keep on doing her things around the house without needing to ask anyone for help. And Dymotics was born.

Creating a company is not an easy task, but with a great idea and the collaboration of many friends and professionals, Dymotics was possible. We met each other almost by chance, discovering and sharing our passion to make people’s lives easier and our eagerness to start something brand-new and fresh.

How are you managing your funding needs and what’s your attitude towards the  global startup environment (university support, startup funding rounds, angel investors, startup awards / contests, etc.)?

After being finalists in the Startup Accelerator Wayra, we were more motivated than ever; we kept fighting until we got an investment from the Mola group. Later, at the end of last year, we received an Enisa state funding; a funding contribution that is given to only the most promising startups in the Spanish market.

Also, in September last year we created a crowd funding campaign through Indiegogo and are proud to say we reached our funding goal. We have started this year very hopeful and looking forward to keep growing. We just participated in Lionscage’s international pitch competition, and we won!

We’ think Dymotics is a very smart solution, and integration could be the real challenge for the future development of home automation. What’s the added value of your product/service compared to the market? What’s your disruptive potential towards leading companies/products?

Our company is the first to unify every brand in just one simple, beautiful app. It’s an inexpensive system that allows everyone to enjoy the advantages of home automation. Dymotics’ big value add is its price and ease of use avoiding all of these:

• wasting too much time on tasks, running on different apps from different brands
• being expensive, difficult, not user-friendly with the need for separate home automation services
• uncomfortable and costly building modifications to allow for installation

And our private market! Thanks to our free software, everyone can look into it and look for improvements. We’re creating a programmers’ community in which everyone who wants to, can create an app and sell/share it in our market place and make our app even more useful.

We try to solve very common problems in home automation.

What trends are going to reshape the home automation industry? Which startups, in the European scenario, are carrying on the most innovative and cutting edge projects, in your opinion?

The modern home automation market is growing more and more each day, and we think the biggest milestones are brand integration, simplifying its use and lowering product price. Trends are easy to see: every new brand is more focused on design and simplicity. Gone are the days when domotic devices were difficult to install or needed cables and home structural modifications.

Tell us the best results achieved, the hardest troubles you faced and…the funniest experiences you’ve been through since your startup foundation.

Our proudest achievement so far is people’s interest in our product. Since we started, we’ve had more than 15 thousand visitors to our web, 500 users of our beta app and more than 13 thousand visits to our crowd funding campaign (in just 2 months!). It’s been great to see people like our project as much as we do.

One of the biggest challenges we have faced is explaining the product. To people who have already used home automation it is pretty easy to explain our integration and how our product operates, but a lot of people have never used modern home automation and it’s difficult to make them understand how it works. If they don’t know what X10 is, how do we explain our biggest advantage; brand unification?

One of the greatest experiences is when we are explaining how it all works and we say: ‘wait, you’ll see’. We take our phone from our pocket, open the app, select the light of the room we are in and press ‘Off’. The light goes off. Some even clap! Others point the smartphone at the light like a remote control. Awesome!

Are you going to partner up with leading installer, utilities/providers (telcos, energy suppliers, HVAC installers, etc.) to make your product even more easy to access?

For now, Dymotics is focused on self-installation: you buy our Hub, download our app which detects every device you have at home and installs everything automatically so you can start to use them right away. That’s the reason we don’t send installers, but we keep in contact with some just in case we need them for some of our clients.

And yes, we already have Fibaro as a partner and are looking forward to partnering up with telcos and energy suppliers to start selling wholesale. Some of them have already contacted us!

NB The header image featured in this post (in home page) is by Patrice Letarnec from his project Head Walk (all rights reserved)