Stack Labs, the company behind the heralded Stack Lighting smart bulbs, is no longer selling consumer lighting. The company, founded by former NASA and Tesla engineers in 2013, launched with audacious plans and great fanfare, including a feature article in Wired. We covered that announcement on Home: On just three years ago.
Stack’s great innovation was a departure from smart lighting at the time: they put the sensors and smarts in the bulbs themselves, and they launched initially with BR30 floods to serve office and home markets. An array of onboard sensors—including occupancy, motion, lighting, and even temperature—work with learning algorithms to tune the color and intensity of the light for your space, your activity, and the time of day. They can also act as remote sensors for Nest’s thermostat and notify you of unanticipated motion when you’re out.
We’ve been testing review units of the bulbs, and as recently as last December, Stack was promoting its second product innovation, a standard (A19) bulb that could sense occupancy through a lamp shade using RF technology, while CNET was writing about the product line’s great benefits.
We saw Stack at an event around CES 2017, and then silence. We tried reaching out to our contacts at Stack prior to posting a product review, noticing that all products were sold out in their online store and on Amazon, and you could no longer find the bulbs at retail. Stack’s site started getting stale, and they weren’t introducing further updates or capabilities after launching their Alexa skill. So ultimately, our review didn’t post…which is a shame, because the product is great, and we were eager to test the next-generation A19.
Meanwhile, Stack’s blog was promoting news about their inroads in a new vertical—managed aging care. Stack was using its groundbreaking sensor technology to help care facilities better monitor and manage aging resident/patient activity. They even won an award for it.
That leads us to the unfortunate but unsurprising place where we are now. This notice sits in place of Stack’s legacy home page:
Stack Labs Inc has sold its lighting technology and will continue to operate its software and spatial awareness division as Stack.Care, which focuses on providing monitoring and lighting solutions for the senior community market.
Stack will no longer be selling its light bulbs and will announce more information soon.
For additional information on the Stack Care solution, please go to Stack.Care.
SEC filings show a recent infusion of capital, relatively many years after their initial seed funding. And updates on Stack Care’s web site suggest a management change, with former CEO and founder Neil Joseph now listed as a “Board Member,” presumably to better support the new focus.
We’re always happy to see a company find a new focus when their initial plans don’t play out as anticipated, and the aging care space is certainly one that can benefit from IoT technology. But it’s still disappointing to see the end of unique and innovative consumer products—particularly when they offer so much promise.
What’s unclear at this time is what’s to become of the products that are already in consumers’ homes and offices. These depend a hub, an app, and presumably cloud services that likely won’t live on forever. We’ll be keeping an eye out for the above-mentioned announcement.
If you look at Jeanne Peng’s LinkedIn page (who used to work at Stack Lighting) she mentions Stack in her previous experience section as “Acquired by Philips Lighting…”
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanne-peng-96581518/
Very good sleuthing, Nate! I’ll have to follow up on that. I’d love to see Philips adapt the Stack technology into product offerings of its own. Thanks for the tip!
I bought several Stack bulbs when they first came out. I loved it more than the Philips Hue because of the built-in motion sensors and automatic light ambience. I’m looking forward to what Philips does with the technology.