BrightAI Founder Achieves $80M in Revenue by Casually Tinkering in Basement, Discovers IoT Might Actually Be Useful
In a tale ripped straight from the pages of “Accidental Millionaire,” Alex Hawkinson, the unassuming mastermind behind the consumer-worshipped smart devices empire SmartThings, has somehow stumbled into $80 million in revenue with his new venture, BrightAI. It’s a classic story of a guy who sold a company to Samsung for a mere $200 million, only to decide that solving the world’s trivial inconveniences wasn’t quite fulfilling enough.
After realizing that the Internet of Things (IoT) might be good for more than just letting you check if your plant’s thirst level is approaching Sahara Desert status, Hawkinson vanished from the cushy chair of SmartThings in 2018. He ventured into the wild, questing for problems that crave the soothing balm of connectivity. “It was like a midlife crisis where instead of buying a Ferrari, I decided to reinvent the entire functionality of physical reality,” he reportedly mused over a latte poured by a robotic barista, courtesy of BrightAI’s latest prototype.
BrightAI, shocked and confused by its own success, nonchalantly bootstrapped its way to $80 million, thus proving that miracles are real and sometimes they even like to dabble in sensor technology. “All we did was ask what mundane aspect of life could be slightly less insufferable,” stated a BrightAI spokesperson who wore a shirt literally made of Wi-Fi. “Now our sensors are so smart, they practically read your mind. They had to tone it down a bit. There was a small incident involving a sensor that developed sentience… but we’re working through that.”
The venture bucks the trend of relying on venture capitalists, who are probably too busy funding the next app that promises to generate random startup ideas. Instead, BrightAI embraced bootstrapping, a method they describe as “building a business with literal bootstraps, innovation, and a shoe-string budget we found lying in the parking lot of a venture capitalist’s office.”
Consumers are equally baffled and amused. “If someone’s going to leverage the limitless possibilities of AI to somehow make my life slightly more convenient while simultaneously freaking me out with their omniscient data sensors, it might as well be these guys,” said one of BrightAI’s loyal users, tucking an absurdly complex device that claims to organize your fridge by nutritional value into her purse.
Critics of the IoT craze have gone from skepticism to an incurable sense of bewildered optimism. “If Alex can transform connected devices into a functional digital ecosystem capable of rearranging reality, who’s to say we can’t use IoT to solve world peace or eliminate traffic jams by next Tuesday?” inquired a tech analyst who asked to remain anonymous due to an outbreak of sudden hope.
As BrightAI forges ahead, perhaps saving the world one IoT device at a time, the question on everyone’s mind is: what will Hawkinson bootstrap next? Perhaps a smart device for tracking how smart our devices are getting? Only time, and a few more billion in accidental revenue, will tell.
