After a first round of $1.7M and a second of $14.6M from Xerys Capital, CapDecisif Management, NovX (the Noveo Group’s investment vehicle) and various business angels, Sevenhugs has raised an additional $9M from Xerys Capital in order to further develop and distribute their smart home solutions both in the U.S. and globally.

In 2018, Sevenhugs successfully launched the world’s first remote control with a precise indoor positioning system. Using Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) technology, Sevenhugs’ spatial awareness technology offers contextual and intuitive control of devices and services within the digital home (TV, music, smart home devices and streaming services).

With Smart Remote, Sevenhugs offered a unique solution to a two-fold challenge:

1. Simplifying the interaction between the user and the digital home to make it more intuitive. Thanks to Sevenhugs’ contextual “point & control” technology, Smart Remote’s touchscreen automatically adapts to any device it’s being pointed at: Simply point Smart Remote at the device you wish to control and the right display will automatically appear.
2. Unifying the experience of entertainment and smart home devices within a single platform. Smart Remote has the ability to control more than 650,000 products.

Smart Remote was successfully launched in 2018 online at Bestbuy.com and on the company’s own website. Following successful sales, Sevenhugs entered into an exclusive distribution agreement with Best Buy in 2019, regarding Smart Remote U, which is now retailed in all 1,000 Best Buy stores, covering the entire U.S. territory.

Smart Remote has received more than 20 prestigious international awards, among those the Red Dot Design Award and the iF DESIGN AWARD. Smart Remote is also on display and sold at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City.

Furthermore, Sevenhugs is strengthening its executive team in research and development in the areas of artificial intelligence and cloud platforms with the recent appointment of Julien Colafrancesco as the company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and the hiring of Baptiste Daroussin for the position of VP Engineering:

• Since 2015, Julien Colafrancesco has been in charge of all developments linked with artificial intelligence and indoor positioning technology via Ultra-Wide Band (UWB), currently being used in the heart of Smart Remote. He has also contributed to the filing of Sevenhugs’ 26 patents. Before joining Sevenhugs, Julien occupied the role of Chief Scientific Officer at Weezic (acquired in 2014 by SmartMusic);
• Baptiste Daroussin has more than 15 years of experience in the development and deployment of large-scale cloud infrastructures and brings his strategic skills to Sevenhugs. Before joining Sevenhugs, Baptiste was Head of Operations at Veepee (Vente Privée) and CTO at Gandi.

To reinforce their ambitious roadmap, Sevenhugs has grown its team to 35 engineers, five of whom specialize in artificial intelligence and are developing the innovations of tomorrow.

Press release. Know more about Sevenhugs on: https://www.sevenhugs.com

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