Professional Smart Home, Without the Complexity
We believe professional home automation shouldn't require technical expertise or endless troubleshooting.
YOUR AUTOMATION PARTNER
Your Home Deserves Better Than a Call Center
I'm a data scientist by training, but my real obsession started ten years ago when I installed my first smart thermostat. It was supposed to be simple. Three hours and two YouTube tutorials later, I had a working thermostat and an obsession that would change the trajectory of my career.
What started as a hobby became a passion project, then a proving ground. I spent years building and refining automated systems across my own properties—learning what works, what fails, and most importantly, what actually makes daily life better versus what just looks impressive on paper. After three years of running this infrastructure in my own home, friends and family started asking me to build the same for them.
That's when I realized: most smart home companies sell products. Very few actually solve the problem of making a home work for you.
I built Somni Labs because I believe smart home automation should feel effortless, not like a second job. My technical background gives me the foundation to design systems that are genuinely intelligent—not just connected. My years in the U.S. Army Reserve taught me discipline, reliability, and the importance of showing up when you say you will. And my education in Entrepreneurship taught me that the best businesses are built on relationships, not transactions.
What This Means for You
When you work with Somni Labs, you work with me. Directly. No call centers. No "technician roulette" where you explain your system to a different person every time. I'm intentionally limiting my client roster to just a few households this first year because I'd rather do exceptional work for a few families than mediocre work for many.
This isn't a business I'm trying to scale as fast as possible. It's a craft I'm committed to perfecting—starting with your home.
Gerardo Palacios · Founder, Somni Labs
The Problem We're Solving
Somni Labs started from direct experience managing a small HOA building and implementing smart home automation across multiple properties. We quickly noticed two gaps in the market:
1. Homeowners who want professional-grade smart homes have to DIY everything or deal with fragmented cloud services.
2. Small property owners can't find affordable tools that integrate property management with building automation.
Option 1: Traditional Property Management Software
Tools like AppFolio and Buildium are great for managing tenants and leases. But they don't include building automation. No smart locks, no energy monitoring, no environmental sensors. Just software.
Option 2: Enterprise Building Management Systems
Major corporations use these for their office towers. They're sophisticated and powerful, but they cost $100-300 per unit per month. Way too expensive for a 10-unit building.
Option 3: DIY Smart Home
Home Assistant is powerful, but it's not a solution for most people. It requires technical knowledge, constant maintenance, troubleshooting integration issues, and doesn't include property management features for landlords.
The gap: Homeowners want professional smart home automation without DIY complexity. Small property owners need that PLUS integrated property management. Nobody was building either solution affordably.
So we built it ourselves.
What Makes Somni Different
1. Local-First, Always
Your home, your data, your hardware.
We don't believe in cloud vendor lock-in. When your smart home or property data lives on someone else's servers, you're at their mercy. Prices go up, features get removed, or the company gets acquired and everything changes.
Somni runs on hardware you own, at your location. Everything stays local. You're not trapped.
2. Open-Source Foundation
No black boxes. Full transparency.
Every Somni component is built on open-source technology. No backdoors, no hidden behaviors, no vendor lock-in.
If you ever want to leave Somni's managed service, you can. Hire another integrator or manage it yourself. The technology isn't proprietary.
3. Integrated by Design
Smart home automation + optional property management that actually work together.
For homeowners: Professional smart home automation without DIY complexity. For property owners: Add property management features that integrate seamlessly with building automation.
Somni was designed from the ground up to integrate them: work orders trigger building automation, building sensors inform property management, energy monitoring ties to unit billing.
Proven, Battle-Tested Infrastructure
The technology powering Somni has been running in production for years—not in a lab, but in real homes and buildings:
- • Real properties with real families and tenants
- • Real failures—power outages, network issues, device malfunctions—all handled
- • Real improvements refined over thousands of hours of actual use
This isn't a startup MVP. The core platform has been managing real homes and properties for years before we ever offered it as a service.
Why this matters: You're getting infrastructure that's already been through the growing pains. We know what breaks and how to prevent it.
Why Only 1-3 Clients to Start?
We could probably handle more technically. But we don't want to.
Here's why we're limiting early access to 1-3 clients:
- Quality over growth: We'd rather do this right than fast. With 1-3 clients, we can personally oversee every deployment, respond immediately to issues, and ensure you're actually happy with the service.
- Learning curve: Every home and property is different. Different layouts, different needs, different challenges. We want to refine the deployment process, documentation, and support systems before scaling.
- Reputation matters: Our reputation is everything. If we overpromise and underdeliver, we've failed. If we take on 10 clients and can't provide great service to all of them, that's worse than taking on 3 and doing it exceptionally well.
- Sustainable growth: Once we've proven this works with 1-3 clients, we'll hire support staff and scale thoughtfully. We're not raising VC money and chasing growth metrics. We're building a sustainable service business.
You benefit: Early access clients get direct team involvement, faster responses, and genuine input on product direction. That's worth more than being customer #47 at a fast-growing startup.
What We Believe
Transparency
We're honest about what works, what doesn't, and what's still in development. No marketing spin, no hiding issues.
Privacy
Your data belongs to you. Local-first architecture isn't just a feature - it's a principle. No hidden cloud dependencies.
Quality
We'd rather take longer to build something right than rush something out. If it's not reliable, it doesn't ship.
Open Source
All core technology is open source. No proprietary lock-in, full transparency, community-driven development.
Service
We're building a service business, not a software startup. Your success is our success. If you're not happy, we haven't done our job.
Where This Is Going
Short term (1-2 years):
Prove the model works with 10-20 clients. Document ROI, operational improvements, and customer satisfaction. Refine the platform based on real-world feedback.
Medium term (3-5 years):
Scale to 100+ clients across Chicagoland. Build a small team to handle support, installations, and customer success. Expand the platform based on customer needs.
Long term (5+ years):
Become the go-to solution for professional smart home automation and integrated property management. Expand beyond Chicagoland through partnerships with local integrators. Continue innovating on open-source foundations.
What won't change:
- Local-first architecture
- Open-source core technology
- No vendor lock-in
- Sustainable, service-focused business model
- Personal involvement in customer success
Get In Touch
Have questions? Want to discuss your specific situation?