Smart lighting company Nanoleaf has been unusually quiet lately. While competitors like Govee and Philips Hue are rolling out new products and Advanced features At an impressive pace, Nanoleaf has only launched a handful of smart lighting products in the past two years. There is a reason for this slowness – the company is going through it. A “brand evolution” Focused on wellness, robotics, and of course AI.

“The smart home is getting kind of boring,” says the ever-outspoken Jimmy Choo, CEO and cofounder of Nanoleaf, which he no longer wants me to call a smart lighting company. “Our brand needs to evolve to include some of the other products we’re going to be releasing.”

Nanoleaf is best known for its customizable, interactive RGB lighting ecosystem, with products like its modular lighting panels and software that mirror the light on your computer or television screen. It was an early adopter of Thread & Meter, and its smart bulb was one of Thread’s first products. Work with Apple’s HomePod Mini. When it started in 2020.

But Chu says open standards like Meter are leading to the commoditization of smart lighting — as companies like Ikea sell full-color smart light bulbs for around $10 that work with every platform. It’s something he and others predicted when the meter launched nearly four years ago.

Chu sees creative AI as the next wave of innovation. For tech company Nanoleaf, that means focusing on embodied AI, where the technology can exist and interact with the real world. “It’s putting intelligence into hardware that actually does something useful,” Chu says, not just putting ChatGPT into a speaker. “AI is a huge buzzword right now, but it’s a transformative technology that will change the way everything works, including the products we make.”

While he’s tight-lipped about specifics, he says he has at least three products launching around embodied AI this year. The images he shared suggest that it will be an AI-powered toy, a desk companion, and a robotic microcontroller.

Oh Blog post The company’s site 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 offer any concrete details about what that will actually look like. Chu will only state that a product is related to early childhood development. He also said robotics will be a big part of the company’s future, but it will take some time to get there.

The second axis 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 this year will launch four new red light therapy devices to treat your face and body. These will include “heat, and massage/vibration settings,” Chu says.

Like most of the wellness gadget market, consumer red light therapy sits somewhere in between. Science And the hype. The selling point of the Nanoleaf is the price. Chu says he has been able to leverage his expertise in LED lighting and supply chain to make these products more affordable than most current options in the US.

Chu says Nanoleaf will remain focused on smart lighting, even as it moves into other areas. He says that’s 80 to 90 percent of the business left, and he plans to release new form factors and updates. The company will attend the IFA tech show in Berlin this fall, where it will launch several new products. “We’re launching support for Matter 1.4 soon, and we have another product called Matter 1.5, which we’re releasing this year,” says Chu. “So, we’re not going to slow down.”

But he says the hard work was in the underlying technology, and now it’s easier for the company to come up with new lamp form factors, or bulb shapes. “A lot of the innovation behind home and gaming lighting was making the connection,” he says. “It was all the blood, sweat and tears that actually solved the thread and material.” As an early adopter, Nanoleaf was hit particularly hard by the delayed rollout of the standard. Today, Chu wants to point all those R&D efforts to new challenges.

One area of ​​smart lighting he’s still passionate about is making it more accessible to AI. All of Nanoleaf’s products have open APIs, and Chu is looking to eventually open source the code. “That’s the direction the technology is going. With our lighting products and most smart home products, the more open you can make it, the more compatible it can be with AI,” he says. Allow the user to customize their lighting to what they need, he says. “That’s really the power of the Internet of Things.”

Cho’s enthusiasm for the next big thing is understandable for a tech company CEO. For tinkerers, developing new ways to control their smart lights with AI can be a fun side project. But existing users of Nanoleaf might want the company to focus on just innovating its ecosystem and bringing new features and functions to its app.

The smart home is undergoing a major evolution on the AI ​​front and in the context of matter – a standard that, if successful, makes connected devices interchangeable. For companies like Nanoleaf, that means differentiation matters more than ever. I’m not sure creating AI companions and wellness gadgets is the way to go here, but at least Nanoleaf is thinking big.