Our Story

Athom was founded by Emile Nijssen & Stefan Witkamp. As the first successful Kickstarter from The Netherlands, they raised € 203,918 to make Homey a reality.

Being fresh from the university, both aged 22, they had no idea what journey was ahead...

While the development of Homey was underway, Athom raised € 1M from angel investors to grow and manufacture new products after all Kickstarter orders had been shipped.

At the end of the year, the first Homeys are rolling off the factory belts.

We’ve now shipped to all Kickstarter backers. The software is receiving an update almost every week. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but it works quite well.

Later that year, Homey launched in retail! With big stores such as MediaMarkt we’ve made the leap from internet-only to a real-world product.

Zigbee now works! While the hardware has been there since the beginning, there was no great software around, so we had to create an entire Zigbee stack ourselves.

Additionally, we’ve launched Homey Music, where we tried to combine multiple music services such as Spotify, SoundCloud and YouTube into a shared playlist. Unfortunately, that never worked well, so we killed it a year later. 😅

The world was moving towards mobile-first, and so were we. With a beautiful new app, completely rebuilt from the ground up, Homey could be controlled entirely from a smartphone. Flow and Insights became available as separate web apps shortly after.

Additionally, that year support for KNX was released and the first integrations with Alexa & Google Assistant went live.

We introduced Homey Pro, a more powerful variant based on the same hardware with double the RAM and CPU speed.

Shortly after the introduction, we noticed that practically everyone buys Homey Pro, so we decided not to manufacture the € 299 Homey anymore.

New software updates added new functionalities such as inviting Family & Friends, Cameras, Zone Activity, Share a Flow and Homey Energy.

We’ve launched the all-new Homey web app, where most functionality is now available cross-platform. With redesigned interfaces for Devices, Flow, Insights & HomeyScript, we’ve unified the Homey experience across devices.

Later that year, we launched our first subscription, Homey Pro Backups. An instant success!

Many smaller improvements have been released, such as Z-Wave S2, Apps SDK v3, Zigbee 3.0 and Siri Shortcuts.

However, this year’s biggest announcement was Homey Bridge with the free Homey service. It was also our first keynote ever! We launched the service shortly after in public beta.

Due to chip shortages because of COVID-19, Homey has been out of stock for a long time.

We introduced Advanced Flow for a one-time fee of €25. Thankfully, it was so popular that it gave us some breathing room to survive COVID, even without hardware sales.

At the end of the year, we introduced the next-gen Homey Pro, our largest success so far.

The all-new Homey Pro ships to customers. In the meantime, we’ve worked on many free updates such as Zone Controls, Insights for Mobile, iOS Widgets, and support for Matter & Thread.

The company has grown to about 40 people, and we moved to a new office in the city center of Enschede.

We’ve introduced Moods, a brand-new way to make beautiful lighting scenes. Port forwarding is live. We’ve launched Best Buy Guides to help our customers find their next smart home product.

What’s next? We can’t say, but there’s a lot more to be launched…