Jeff Baumgartner, Senior Editor
March 31, 2025
3 Min Read
(Source: Andriy Popov/Alamy Stock Photo)
OliverIQ, a startup that is pitching a smart-home-as-a-service (SHaaS) platform to ISPs in the US and abroad, has some fresh financial footing and market scale after merging with SAVI Controls.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the merged, privately held company, called SAVI iQ, will now focus on the residential and commercial sides of the managed IoT services sector. While OliverIQ has leaned into the residential end of the market, SAVI Controls has a solid foothold on the commercial side, counting AT&T Stadium in Dallas, Top Golf, Pizza Hut, Atomic Golf in Las Vegas, GameStop and Chicken N Pickle among its partners.
"By combining these two companies, we're essentially operating two lines of business – SAVI Commercial and SAVI Home," explained Glen Mella, the former chief revenue officer of OliverIQ who has taken on the same role at the combined company. Will West, previously the CEO at OliverIQ, now serves as CEO of SAVI iQ.
The merged companies aren't exactly strangers. SAVI Controls was once a top dealer for Control4, a high-end smart home automation company (sold in 2019) that was founded by some execs who also were part of OliverIQ's founding team. SAVI Controls and OliverIQ also had previously collaborated on the manufacturing of lighting control products and touchscreen interfaces, Mella noted.
Related:OliverIQ fine-tunes its smart home pitch for broadband operators
The merger will provide OliverIQ with some financial backing and additional market scale. OliverIQ, a startup that made its debut at CES 2024 in Las Vegas, was in the pre-revenue stage and venture backed. SAVI Controls, by comparison, pulls in revenues in the "tens of millions," Mella said.
Residential focus continues
Mella said the goal for the former OliverIQ is unchanged – to develop and sell a platform designed to make it easy for consumers to build, integrate and manage smart homes outfitted with a wide range of connected devices, such as doorbells, cameras, locks, garage door openers, lights and thermostats. That platform, which is also designed to keep IoT devices powered by the latest firmware versions, is being linked to an AI- and voice-powered assistant called "Ollie" that helps consumers deploy, manage and troubleshoot their IoT devices.
The distribution plan for the residential side of the business is also unchanged. Like OliverIQ, SAVI iQ aims to develop partnerships with broadband service providers. The general idea is to equip ISPs with a white-labeled, subscription-based smart-home-as-a-service platform that can be used to accelerate average revenues per user (ARPU) and to reduce churn.
Related:OliverIQ pitches smart home-as-a-service to broadband service providers
Prior to the merger, OliverIQ had an active pipeline of ISPs in the US and internationally. Following an initial mix of small-scale deployments and trials, several ISP partners have plans to offer the company's smart home platform starting in the second half of 2025. Some of those ISPs have hundreds of thousands of customers and others with customers in the millions, Mella said.
OliverIQ had previously said it will rely on a pair of business models: fees based on per-service activations and per-router fees. The company had also focused on multiple deployment options, including smart home control software that can run in ISP-provided routers or via a separate hardware hub that's equipped with an array of antennas and connectivity options such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Thread, Matter and Z-Wave.
SAVI iQ's focus on the residential smart home platform market is not foreign to the US broadband sector. Cox Communications, for example, continues to sell a smart home service called Home Life. Comcast offers Xfinity Home, a service that launched in 2012 and was expanded via Comcast's 2017 acquisition of a piece of a company called Icontrol. AT&T wound down its Digital Life home security offering in 2022.
However, SAVI iQ aims to re-spark the market with a platform that makes it easy for consumers to deploy devices to the smart home, and to back it with an AI-assisted platform that can automate multiple functions. Examples of those would include a "wake up" function that turns on lights and turns up the heat in the morning, or automatically turns off lights and locks doors at bedtime.
