Minut closes $8 million Series A funding round

Sweden: Home security technology firm Minut has closed an $8 million Series A funding round, following its production of a camera-less home device that it claims offers better protection to guests’ privacy than its market rivals.

The round has been led by KPN Ventures, with international energy services company Centrica also participating. Existing backers Karma Ventures, SOSV and Nordic Makers also invested, which brings Minut’s total funding to $10 million.

Minut, which was founded in 2014 and led by CEO Nils Mattisson, aims to make home security monitoring more affordable to customers while still ensuring that their product is of the highest possible quality for protecting privacy. Its latest signature product is an IoT camera-less device which captures real-time data through infrared motion detection and a microphone on the device itself to process any security disruptions to homes and short-term rental properties.

Mattisson told Tech Crunch: “Feeling safe shouldn’t be a luxury, or come at the cost of privacy. Until recently, the most affordable solution for home security and monitoring has been Wi-Fi-connected cameras, but people don’t want or trust them in their homes.”

“This approach is technically much more challenging than recording sounds and sending them to a back-end for analysis like an Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, but it enables us to identify events, such as a window-break or the presence of people, without ever actually recording any sound.

“Features are instead extracted from sensor data in real time and analysed on the device. When the local neural network recognises that something can be an event, only the extracted fingerprint then gets sent to a global classifier that can do a deeper and more accurate assessment.

“It’s not possible to reconstruct the sound from the fingerprint,” he added.

The company says its ‘unique’ approach stems from monitoring a home while ‘respecting the integrity of the people who live there’.

At the current time of writing, Minut has sold more than 10,000 units in 60 countries. It currently employs around 30 people across its HQs in Malmö, Stockholm and London, with the latter office opening most recently.

According to Mattisson, the capital injection will help to ‘accelerate growth across markets and to strengthen the product portfolio’.

For more information, visit the Minut website here.