We are building the thing we could not find for our own families

What we are trying to fix

A typical urban Indian flat now runs somewhere around fourteen connected devices. Cameras in the drawing room and at the gate, a smart lock, two or three televisions, a handful of phones, a work laptop, a voice assistant somebody was gifted, and increasingly a patrol robot. Almost none of it was configured by the household. Nearly all of it shares one password.

The security industry’s answer to this has been to sell fear, mostly to people who already work in technology. That is not who lives in these homes. The people most exposed — parents, grandparents, anyone who was handed a smartphone and told to figure it out — are the ones least served by a product that assumes you know what a MAC address is.

How we decide what to build

Three rules, in order. First, if a feature cannot be explained to somebody’s mother in one sentence, the feature is wrong, not the explanation. Second, we do not describe anything in the present tense until it ships — which is why the pricing table has a dependency column and the Home Hub page sells a waitlist. Third, household features come before network features, because the household is where the actual arguments happen.

Where we are

Pre-launch. Discovery, household roles, the permission matrix and guest access are built and tested. Automated scans, the alerts pipeline, Scam Check and Ask Netra are Phase 2. The Home Hub, compliance tracking and the OEM programme are Phase 3, months seven to twelve. We would rather publish that list than imply a finished product.