Home Assistant 🤝 Ubiquiti Networks

Paulus Schoutsen April 12, 2018

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TL;DR: Ubiquiti Networks has hired Paulus Schoutsen, the founder of Home Assistant, to support Home Assistant’s goals of making Home Assistant easier to configure for users, improving the integration with device makers and making it easier to create, maintain and evolve integrations.

Home Assistant is an open source project that thus far has been run by people in their spare time. In the last four and a half years it has grown from just me building a tiny framework with a handful of integrations to having our own operating system, over a 1000 integrations, superb performance, contributions by over 900 people, and our main Docker image has been pulled over 10 million times!

Observing this growth and passionate community, Ubiquiti Networks approached us.

Ubiquiti Networks currently focuses on 3 main technologies: high-capacity distributed Internet access, unified information technology, and next-gen consumer electronics for home and personal use. Their enterprise quality combined with their affordability has made them very popular among our users. They also share another passion of ours: trying to avoid clouds. Take for example their UniFi Video IP surveillance solution: it is a completely local hosted solution.

They recognize great potential in Home Assistant becoming the defacto platform for the home: fast, open source and local. They also want to deepen the integration of Ubiquiti Networks products in Home Assistant and may even support hosting Home Assistant instances on their hardware.

And so we have agreed that I (Paulus, founder Home Assistant) will join Ubiquiti Networks as a full time employee to focus on growing Home Assistant. I’ll now be able to devote my full energy to making Home Assistant easier to configure for users, improving the integration with device makers and making it easier to create, maintain and evolve integrations.

Ubiquiti Networks will not acquire any ownership of Home Assistant. We will remain an independent and open source project, just improving faster than ever with the support of Ubiquiti Networks.

I’m very excited about this opportunity and 2018 will be a really really great year for Home Assistant!

Photo of Paulus, the founder of Home Assistant, standing in front of a Ubiquiti Networks logo wearing a Home Assistant t-shirt. Paulus Schoutsen, founder of Home Assistant, at the NYC Ubiquiti office.