Homelync’s acquisition by Aico represents a significant milestone for social landlords looking to procure connected solutions.
Aico is the UK market leader in domestic Fire and Carbon Monoxide protection, pioneering new technologies and offering high quality Fire and Carbon Monoxide alarms. Known for their focus on education, quality, service and innovation they are the premium brand in social housing. After the successful roll out of their popular SmartLINK Gateway, and due to customer demand, they have ambitious plans to expand further into the social housing Internet of Things (IoT) and connected home market.
Homelync are an award-winning, innovative technology firm that specialize in smart home integration and analytics technology. With industry-leading expertise in the Internet of Things (IoT), software development and integration, the Homelync team are at the forefront of this progressive market. Homelync have widely rolled out integrated IoT solutions for social landlords across the UK to help them tackle challenges associated with cost savings, maintenance efficiency, decarbonization,tenant safety, fuel poverty, and social care. This is done by leveraging an ecosystem of leading IoT devicesincluding temperature, humidity, CO2, fire safety, water leak, boilers, and energy.
This acquisition represents a significant step forward for IoT in social housing at a time when the market has recently seen significant growth. The acquisition gives landlords the opportunity to invest in IoT over a longer term investment cycle by providing an additional layer of confidence that couples Homelync’s innovation with the resources of a well-established brand that is trusted in the sector. Aico’s heritage of 30 years standing provides great strength for all landlords.
Commenting on the acquisition, Homelync CEO Luke said; “Our vision is to harness new technology to make social housing smarter, safer and more efficient. The strategic investment by, and future close collaboration with Aico, will help us accelerate our objectives in this regard. The vendor agnostic, open sensor ecosystem we have developed is 100% complementary to what Aico offers its customers today. Add to this our team, with decades of experience in software, hardware, machine learning and local government, and we believe we have the essential ingredients for a very successful partnership.”
By analysing IoT data and presenting actionable insights, Homelync helps landlords meet several of their strategic objectives whilst generating a significant return on investment (on average 5:1 and up to 10:1 depending on the landlord and devices deployed). By partnering with Aico, Homelync can offer to a larger market scalable and reliable IoT solutions that are tailored to a landlord’s specific needs.
Commenting further, Aico Managing Director Neal Hooper said; “Aico and Homelync is a perfect partnership – Aico being the UK market leader in Fire and CO detection and Homelync complementing this with advanced data insight and analytics across associated housing environmental sensors including temperature, humidity, energy usage and gas boilers. Complementing Aico’s Gateway which provides real time data insight into connected Fire and CO alarms within a property, Homelync’s advanced machine learning and analytics of this collective data will provide our customers with state of the art data insight across their connected properties. We are extremely excited around the value this is able to bring to customers across the social housing sector and look forward to continuing innovations and progression across the Connected Home and IoT arena.”
This exciting partnership allows Homelync to leverage Ei’s world class manufacturing capability and Aico’s market leading approach to innovation, customer service and quality to bring a reliable and scalable IoT solution which reduces the risk that landlords would otherwise face when procuring technology from start-up businesses.