Viva Labs raises €400,000 to expand smart home solution across Europe


    Norway’s Viva Labs announces today that they’ve picked up around €400,000 in seed funding to help build out partnerships for their smart home solutions. This round of funding came from Oslo coworking space Startuplab’s Founders Fund as well as Investinor, an investment company owned by the Norwegian government.

    Viva’s solution uses smart plugs to control lighting and heating, and lately has added a lot of hardware products that can be more permanently installed when building homes. Henrik Holen of Viva Labs explains that by using GPS and sensors, their solution can learn household routines and handle aspects of your life like heating, control, and security without any user input, sort of like Google’s Nest, but for everything.

    On that front, one of the more interesting things Viva is doing is taking on the home security market. By installing cameras in your home, you can keep an eye on things when their solution detects any suspicious activity. Additionally Viva knows when you’re home or not, thanks to the GPS features in the app, so the solution is much more frictionless and useful than a simple alarm.

    “We’re very excited to be a able to launch that with a partner now,” says Holen. “We think its a way to really disrupt that old version of how you interact with our home security where have to press buttons, it beeps, it sounds scary, and you have to run out of your house.”

    Additionally Viva is working on electronic door locks, which can be a huge industry. Not having to take keys out of your pocket is a benefit, but it’s also a way to give temporary access to someone like a cleaner or a nanny through just an app or potentially just a SMS.

    To sell these solutions, Viva goes with the whitelabel approach, selling these packaged solutions to utilities, cable companies, or telecoms who already have a presence in your home. With the funding they hope to hire more people to assist with business development and sales to enterprise organizations across Europe. “Those are the people we’re looking for right now, so feel free to get in touch,” says Holen.