Well color me intrigued. Roost, a startup founded a few months ago by former Ozmo CEO Roel Peeters has launched with $975,000 in seed funding from DCM Partners and Legend Star, an investment division of China’s Legend Holdings. As part of the funding, Slingbox creator Jason Krikorian, now a general partner at DCM, is working with the company.
Roost plans to reveal the details of its first product at its launch at Structure Connect on Oct. 21 and 22 in San Francisco, but it promises to be a retrofit for a common household device to add connectivity for less than $50. Given that cost is one of the huge factors keeping consumers away from the smart home, a sub-$50 retrofit could make a lot of sense provided its easy to implement.
I currently can add a $50 light switch to my home and make it smarter, but it involves playing around with high-voltage wires. That’s not as simple as it needs to be for mainstream adoption. And Peeters is aiming his product at the mainstream market, using the funding to build a company today and then planning a crowdfunding campaign in the fall to support the manufacturing of the actual device.
In the meantime, we can speculate what Peeters, who is the former co-founder of low-power Wi-Fi chip firm Ozmo, might be doing with his skills as a low-power radio guy with high-level contacts at Atmel (which purchased Ozmo in December 2012.)
Update: The story has been corrected to reflect that Jason Krikorian is working with the company but is not a board member.

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