Written by Dino K.
Welcome to the Smart Home Founders series, where the people behind today’s smart home innovations share their stories. In this edition, we talk to Marton Borzak, the founder and CEO of Unfolded Circle, a company making advanced smart home remote controllers.
Unfolded Circle develops beautiful, high-quality, and privacy-focused multi-purpose smart remotes, designed to simplify control of your smart home and entertainment devices. Equipped with Bluetooth, Infrared, and Wi-Fi connectivity, these remotes seamlessly connect to and control all your smart devices paired with Homey.
Hello Marton! Thanks for joining me today. Can you take us back to the very beginning? What gave you the idea to create Unfolded Circle?
“It was many years ago when we moved into an apartment, and I decided, 'Okay, I'm going to create a smart home.' I started with a sound system, a projector, and a TV, but I quickly found controlling each individually was not really user friendly. I then started looking for a remote that could unify all my devices and control them from one place, but I couldn't find anything that I liked. There were some solutions out there, but they were either expensive, didn't work well, or you needed to have a guy come and actually program the remote.
Given my background – I'm a designer, studied a little bit of industrial design, worked as a graphic designer, and had a strong affection for electronics and programming – I thought maybe I could build one. And that's how the idea for Unfolded Circle was born.”
Can you clarify the history of your remotes? Was there ever a "Remote 1," or did the journey begin with the device initially known as the YIO Remote Two? Was YIO your first company name?
“Yes, the whole thing started with the name YIO, which was also the name of the Remote Two. However, we quickly discovered other companies were copying and using the same name, which was not a good image for us. So, we came up with the new name, Unfolded Circle, which we thought was very unique and described what we are trying to achieve.
The first remote itself was just a Raspberry Pi connected to a screen with a couple of buttons attached to it – basically a DIY solution with “baby“ software that you could just build yourself at home. I shared it on a forum and received a lot of interesting feedback. That's actually how I met my partners, Markus Zehnder, who became the Head of Software, and Lutz Harder, who became the Head of Hardware. They were very interested in my project and we decided to start a company, so here we are.”
As Unfolded Circle was getting off the ground, did you encounter any significant challenges or difficulties that impacted production, development, or design?
”We were kind of learning as we went along. There are of lot regulatory and boring administrative stuff that you need to do in order to get a product to market, which are all things we had to figure out. But, our biggest setback happened during the chip shortage that happened in COVID.
We started the Kickstarter campaign just before the pandemic hit. We had already chosen a chip for our design, had everything tested and ready to be released. But our supplier could not deliver the SoCs in a time frame that we wanted.
We had to go back and redesign the board completely with a new SoC, which was a massive amount of work. We spent months testing everything and going through the prototyping phase again in order to deliver the Remote 2 to our backers. It turned out to be a good decision in the end, but that was the biggest bump in our journey.”
You've had significant success with both the Remote Two and the Remote 3 on Kickstarter. What made you choose the crowdfunding route for your product launches?
“Having backed several Kickstarters before, I was quite familiar with the atmosphere. I really liked the community that Kickstarter attracted – people looking for interesting new products. That was the main reason we decided to launch on Kickstarter.
We built a really nice community around the Remote 2, and it turned out to be a huge success. As I mentioned earlier, the timing was a bit unfortunate because of COVID, but in the end, we delivered to all backers. After that, we started thinking about Remote 3. Since we had received really positive feedback for Remote 2, we decided to take the same community approach with the Remote 3.”
Raising so much money on Kickstarter was a huge vote of confidence. What do you think it was about the Remotes that people liked so much?
“I mean, I would like to say it was the design because that's my area of expertise, but actually it was several things. I believe people really found it appealing that our remote operates completely locally. The assurance that when you buy our device, even if we were to go away, you can still use it as long as it's working, was a major factor of success.
We put the brains of the operations directly into the remote itself, meaning everything happens right there. The charging dock is smart and can send IR commands, but the core functionality resides in the remote. The dock and the remote connect and communicate with each other simply through your local network. We have a web configuration interface that lives directly on the remote; you just connect to the remote from your browser to do all your setup – we don't require you to create an account or pay for a subscription.
Beyond that, the fact that we had an open API from the start was crucial; our documentation was available for developers to create integrations. We've been incredibly happy to see the community grow, with more and more people developing custom integrations for the remotes. Even the current UI application is open source, allowing for a lot of customization with our remotes. And then, I would like to think that we packaged all of this in a nice way.”
You mentioned the Dock, which is not just a charging station, right? Can you tell us what other features is the Dock 3 equipped with and how does it work with the Remote 3?
“The Remote 3 supports wireless charging, so you can purchase the remote alone and use any wireless charger for power and operation. It remains completely functional even without the Dock 3 station.
The Dock 3, however, provides several extra features. For one, it charges the Remote 3 in an upright position, which is more presentable and looks better. You can also power it directly via Power-over-Ethernet (PoE), providing both connectivity and power through a single cable. Alternatively, there's a USB-C connector at the back you can use for power.
Additionally, the dock is equipped with IR diodes all around the top and bottom, offering much better coverage of the room where it's installed; it has significantly more power and just blasts IR everywhere. We also included two 3.5mm ports on the back, which you can use to connect and control RS232 AV equipment with an upcoming firmware update.”
Getting different smart home devices to work together can be tricky. How does Unfolded Circle handle making the Remote 3 compatible with so many brands and smart home ecosystems like Homey?
”That's a great question, and achieving broad compatibility was actually a core part of our design philosophy from the very beginning. We wanted the Unfolded Circle remote to be incredibly flexible.
Essentially, there are a few ways the remote can integrate with your smart home. If you have a comprehensive smart home hub like Homey already set up, the remote can connect directly to it. In this scenario, Homey handles all the complex communication with your various devices, and the Unfolded Circle remote acts as a beautiful, unified interface to control everything connected through Homey.
However, If you only have a few smart devices, perhaps some smart speakers or lights, the remote can talk to these devices directly using its built-in integrations. For example, we have native integrations for systems several systems, allowing the remote to control them without an intermediary hub.
The real power comes from the ability to combine these methods. You can mix and match direct control for certain devices with hub-based control for others. The Unfolded Circle Remote 2 and Remote 3 both work with Homey.”
The smart home community often considers your remote as the unofficial successor of the popular Logitech Harmony. Do you agree with this assessment?
”That's very flattering to hear, however we are doing things very differently from Logitech. They started 15-20 years ago when smart homes were almost non-existent. So, their approach was to use a Logitech Hub as the central brain and use the remote as a simple controller connected to the hub.
In our case, the remote is the actual brains of operation. We did this because there are many good smart hubs like Homey out there, we didn't want to build yet another system and get drowned in all the compatibility work. Instead, we created a remote with a really nice interface that can talk to as many devices and smart ecosystems as possible, which is a different approach than what Harmony did. We are also much more smart home focused and community driven than Logitech.”
The smart home industry is increasingly implementing the Matter standard for device interoperability. How relevant is Matter to Unfolded Circle's products, and do you have any plans for supporting it?
”We are definitely keeping a close eye on Matter. At the moment, remote controls like ours are not included in the current Matter specification, which makes things quite complicated for us. We find ourselves in an in-between place; we're not simply a couple of buttons or a basic scene controller. We are looking to do something with Matter in the future. For now, we are just waiting until the standard matures and see how it evolves to handle devices like ours.”
Can you give us any hints about new features, integrations, or even new products you might be working on?
”For now, we are focusing on getting the Remote 3 to our Kickstarter backers. We want to fix any annoying little bugs we identify or hear from our community feedback. We do have a lot of ideas for the future, but we want to have a stable baseline first before we start thinking what to do next.”
Thank you very much for talking with me today Marton!
”Thanks for having me, goodbye.”
