Nest Labs
More info
- Creator
- Tony Fadell, Matt Rogers
- Released
- 2010
- Owner
- Type
- Hardware company
The company that made the thermostat something people wanted to show off, and which Google bought for $3.2 billion.
Nest Labs was founded in 2010 by Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, both veterans of Apple's iPod team. The Nest Learning Thermostat shipped in 2011: round, with a screen and a turning ring, and it learned the temperatures you tended to set. The Nest Protect smoke alarm followed in 2013.
Google bought Nest in January 2014. Dropcam was acquired the same year, and in 2016 Nest shut down the servers for Revolv, a smart-home hub it had bought — leaving paying customers with a dead box. It became the textbook case of what cloud-dependent IoT really means. Nest was folded into Google's hardware division in 2018 and is now just a brand, Google Nest.