Nanoleaf is betting its future on robotics, red light therapy, and AI

The Smart Nanoleaf lighting company has been surprisingly quiet lately. While competitors such as Govee and Philips Hue have been producing new products and new things at an impressive speed, Nanoleaf has launched only a few smart lighting products in the last two years. There is a reason for the calm – the company has been through “brand evolution” focuses on healthcare, robotics, and, of course, AI.

“The smart home is becoming boring,” says Gimmy Chu, CEO and founder of Nanoleaf, who doesn’t want me to name the smart lighting company. “Our brand needs to evolve to include some of the things we’re going to bring out.”

Nanoleaf is well known for its RGB lighting design, with features like its own. modular lighting panels and programs that monitor the content of your computer or television. He was the first adopter Threads and Storiesand his smart light bulb was one of Thread’s first products use Apple’s HomePod Mini when it was launched in 2020.

But Chu says open standards like Matter are leading the way in smart lighting — as evidenced by companies like Ikea. selling all kinds of smart bulbs for about $10 which works with any platform. This is something he and others predicted when Matter launched nearly four years ago.

Chu sees AI development as another form of innovation. For technology company Nanoleaf, this means focusing on embedded AI, where technology can exist and interact with the real world. “It’s putting intelligence into things that work,” says Chu, not just putting ChatGPT in the mouth. “AI is great right now, but it’s a transformative technology that will change the way everything works, including the things we make.”

While he’s a stickler for detail, he says he has at least three products launched this year around AI. The images he shared show that this could be an AI-controlled toy, a desk companion, and a robotic controller.

A blog post On the company’s website, they explain how they plan to use AI in “personal and relevant” ways to improve their daily lives and increase the ability to study and learn, but they don’t give details on what this will look like. Chu shares that one thing has to do with childhood growth. He added that robots will be a big part of the company’s future, but it will take time to get there.

Another pivot is health. Nanoleaf introduced a red light therapy mask in 2025which Chu says has become one of the company’s best-selling products. Since then he added a red light therapy panel and wandand will introduce four new red light therapy devices to treat your face and body this year. This will “include heating, and massage/vibration settings,” says Chu.

Like most of the electronics market, consumer electronics support is central science and hype. Nanoleaf’s selling point is price. Chu says it has been able to develop its expertise in LED lighting and support systems to make these products cheaper than what is available in the US.

Chu says Nanoleaf will continue to focus on smart lighting, even as it moves into other areas. It still accounts for 80 to 90 percent of the business, he says, and he plans to keep rolling out new features and updates. The company will attend the IFA technology show in Berlin this fall, where it will launch several new products. “We’re providing support for Matter 1.4 soon, and we have another product called Matter 1.5, which we’re releasing this year,” Chu says. “So, we can’t be late.”

But he says that the persistence was in the basic technology, and now the shape of the new lamp or the shape of the bulb is easier for the company. “A lot of the new home lighting and gaming started the connection,” he says. “It was all blood, sweat, and tears for Thread and Matter to be solved.” As an early adopter, Nanoleaf was heavily influenced by a delay in the release of the standard. Today, Chu wants to focus all R&D efforts on new challenges.

One aspect of smart lighting they’re still excited about is making it accessible to AI. All of Nanoleaf’s products have open APIs, and Chu wants to eventually open source the code. “It’s the way technology is going.” With our lighting products and with many smart home products, when you can make them, they are very compatible with AI, “he says. Let the user adjust their lighting to suit their needs, he says. “That’s the power of the Internet of things.”

Chu’s interest in the next big thing is understandable for a tech company CEO. For tinkerers, creating new ways to control their smart lights with AI can be a interesting project. But Nanoleaf’s existing customers probably want the company to focus on building its ecosystem and bringing new features and services to its software.

The smart home is undergoing a major evolution before AI and after Matter – a standard that, if successful, will make connected devices interchangeable. For companies like Nanoleaf, this means differentiation is more important than ever. I am not satisfied with this house AI friends and hygiene kits are the way to go here, but Nanoleaf is thinking big.