Image: LG Electronics
LG Electronics said on Wednesday that it has acquired an 80% stake in Dutch smart home platform firm Athom, with the remaining 20% to be bought in the next three years.
The South Korean home appliance maker said it plans to integrate Athom's Homey platform which offers extensive connectivity that links appliances, sensors, and light devices, with its own generative AI-enabled LG ThinQ platform.
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This will allow LG to gain "deeper insights" into customers' lifestyle and usage patterns that will, in turn, enable customers to create a personalized environment tailored to their preferences in their "AI homes", it said.
According to LG, Athom offers its open smart home platform Homey that connects with home appliances and IoT devices. Since launching in 2014, Homey has gained hundreds of thousands of users in Europe and it is also available in North America, Singapore, and Australia, LG said.
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Athom's flagship service Homey Pro can connect over 50,000 devices, including those from partners Philips Hue and Ikea, through Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Z-Wave, Matter, Thread, and other wide range of connection methods, the South Korean home appliance maker said.
The Homey App Store also offers approximately a thousand apps based on collaboration with other companies and the Homey community that continues to grow the open platform, LG said. This means more third-party devices and services will be integrated into LG's home appliance ecosystem, it said, and it plans to continue strategic investments into platform-based home appliance solutions such as webOS advertisement platform and AI home.
LG offers a wide variety of hardware we find in the home, from TVs, washing machines, refrigerators, and others. Since launching its webOS TV platform in 2021, it has been keen to capitalize on this wide portfolio by connecting these devices through software for new revenue streams other than strict hardware sales. One of its latest pushes is free ad-supported streaming channels offered on its TVs.
The acquisition of Athom shows that it also wants to discover software-based business models, by having the AI-enabled LG ThinQ platform connect to more devices, in other appliances through the opportunity presented by the recent AI boom.