won $1,500, which they used to buy more parts. A couple months later, they founded the company (then called Canary) and applied to incubator Highway 1, which helps start-ups move from prototype to production.
Now, Birdi has built a prototype (pictured above) that can not only warn users that smoke or carbon monoxide levels have risen, but also alert them when a natural disaster like a hurricane is coming, help track air quality levels, call or text with a warning, and call the police or fire department in an emergency. And when battery levels are low, they’ll mail over new ones, and if necessary, direct users to a partner who can help them change them, like a TaskRabbit. “We want to be the repository for safety in your home. We know where you’re located, and can send push notifications to let you know what’s going on,” he says.
Belinsky and Alvey have also been careful to make sure that the device is useful for people without smartphones; if there’s a fire, they want to be sure that a kid home alone would get an accessible warning in the form of a recorded message sent to a home’s landline. “It all goes back to Grandma,” Belinsky says. “It will call the home phone and explain the problem and how to protect yourself.”
Birdi is currently working to raise a seed round, and also recently launched an Indiegogo campaign to help fund production. As of Feb. 7, about 36 hours before the end of the campaign, the company was already more than $16,000 over its $50,000 goal. The company expects to ship the Birdi Smart Air Monitor by October. Indiegogo buyers could order it for $99, but once it’s on the market it will sell for $120, slightly less than the Nest device.
Though the comparison is an obvious one, the biggest hurdle to bringing the Birdi device to market wasn’t the looming shadow of Nest, Belinsky says. It was just that “hardware is really, really hard.” But with the rise of crowdfunding fueling successful devices like the Pebble watch, and the price of components constantly falling, it will be easier and easier for companies like Birdi and Spark to bring devices to market.
“One of the biggest problems in the industry is that the products have always sucked,” Supalla says. “Most of the time you come out with products that are pretty shallow in terms of what they can do. They have terrible interfaces. They’re often expensive and require installation and customization by a contractor. I think to some extent Nest’s largest innovation in the space just making a product that doesn’t suck.”
