In the not too distant future, your home might be a little psychic. It will even see you coming.
As you approach, the front door opens — having been alerted by a facial recognition camera that tracked you from the car. “Welcome home,” a synthetic voice says as you take off your shoes and put down the mail. You open a package you don’t recognize, which turns out to be a plush toy that grandma sent to your child, which immediately begins off-gassing, but you’re a natural-fiber-only household! Worry not, an air-quality sensor alerts your smart windows to open and air out the room. Outside, a stranger is loitering with a dog, so your house blares sound and light to hurry them on. If they don’t move fast enough, a drone will deploy to reinforce the message.
For a select few, parts of this future are already here. Since 2016, Mark Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto mansion has used Jarvis, an AI assistant (opens in new tab), to unlock doors, control lights, and deliver his ubiquitous gray T-shirts via cannon. Yves Behar, the famed industrial designer, likewise upgraded his 3,800-square-foot Cow Hollow home (opens in new tab) with smart locks and motorized screens.
Behar’s upgrades were bespoke, but he liked them enough that he’s going into the smart-home business. In December, he and Jason Johnson, the former CEO and cofounder of smart lock company August Home, launched Doma, a startup billed as “the intelligence layer for the home.” Its first products are a smart door and window, which will ship in 2027. Pricing is TBD, but as each fenestration is custom made, expect it to be premium.
A Doma smart door prototype. | Source: Peter Belanger
Doma’s doors will have two cameras facing outside — one to capture video, and one for facial recognition — alongside radar and motion sensors. On the indoor side, a screen will show a live video feed. The idea is for users to approve faces — say, the dog walker — so the door will open for them automatically. The windows will use sensors to measure air quality in and outside of the home and open or close as needed, as well as radar to detect occupancy and perimeter activity for security. But they won’t have cameras pointed inward. “People are not comfortable with cameras inside the home,” said Johnson.
Increasingly, Bay Area homeowners are interested in incorporating smart tech for safety (physical and environmental) and convenience, said Jeff Mitchell, a smart-home consultant at Audiovisions Bay Area who works with architects, designers, and builders on multimillion-dollar projects. Smart home device revenue is expected to jump 40% from $10.7 billion in 2024 to 15 billion in 2029, according to data from Parks Associates, (opens in new tab) a consumer tech market research firm. (opens in new tab)
Many customers opt for the full sci-fi package. “A lot of clients say, ‘Oh, my God, I want voice recognition,’” he said. “People don’t want to carry keys.” These are high-net-worth individuals, after all, who want the experience of getting into their poolhouse to be frictionless.
They also want their homes to be fortresses. Since Covid, Mitchell noted, people are more worried about personal safety at home and more willing to adopt security tech. Sauron (opens in new tab), a home security startup named for J.R.R. Tolkien’s ruler of Mordor, hopes to serve these concerns with a suite of products set to launch in 2027.
Founded by Kevin Hartz, cofounder of Eventbrite, and serial entrepreneur Jack Abraham, Sauron has a core package with a collection of mounted camera sensors equipped with facial recognition, LiDAR, and varifocal night vision. They create a 3D model of the home that connects to a home hub monitored round the clock by a remote team of former law enforcement officers. All of this is analyzed by predictive threat-modelingAI that scans perimeter feeds for patterns — such as a car driving by repeatedly or people lingering nearby — and pings the remote team, who can decide whether to turn on spotlights or a loudspeaker. The company is considering offering integration with the controversial license plate tracking company Flock Safety.
We’ve got a lot of people excited for us to use drones, probably a little further down the road now.
Yvonne McLaughlin
The goal is to increase safety for everyone, said Yvonne McLaughlin, Sauron’s head of client experience. Traditional alarms can tell you something’s wrong, she said, “but it’s not going to stop anything from happening.” Security drones were part of the company’s early pitches, but that’s on pause, said McLaughlin, citing regulatory issues. “On the larger estates, it probably makes sense. I think in urban areas, it’s a little harder to manage.” Like Doma, pricing is TBD, but Sauron is also targeting wealthy clients as its first customers, so it won’t be cheap.
Herman Yau, the Sunnyvale-based CEO of a facial-recognition smart door-lock startup, has taken the opposite approach. His company Durin (opens in new tab) (named for the riddle on the Doors of Durin in — you guessed it — Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”), hopes to make smart doors affordable for non-mansion-havers, too. “We [want] to enable a new entry price point for security markets,” he said. Durin’s “door manager” costs $129 and is designed to retrofit to existing locks. “It’s much less friction to upgrade a lock than a door,” he said.
The Doma door lock includes a LCD screen. | Source: Peter Belanger
Durin’s device uses two cues to unlock: sensing your phone is in range via ultra wide broadband technology, plus facial recognition. If you forget your phone, your voice acts as backup — “our version of hiding a key under the planter.”
Experts say that though many companies have sold smart locks — remember Elecpro (opens in new tab)? Otto? (opens in new tab) — the difference this time is that the industry has matured and adopted shared standards, (opens in new tab) plus, of course, the infusion of AI. “There’s going to be an AI engine running in the background [of your home],” Mitchell said, which will make integrating these products much easier. “In the next year, we’re going to see incredibly crazy leaps forward in how our homes work.”