Homebase’s acquisition by an industry leader in the smart home space this week gives its Kansas City team a greater voice in redefining the future of living, said Blake Miller, sharing details of what the exit means for the talent at his Crossroads headquarters.
“We’ve created an entirely new category in an industry (real estate) that traditionally has rejected technology,” said Miller, who founded Homebase in 2016 and now serves as chief product officer at Texas-based Quext. “It’s been an incredibly long and hard journey, but we literally are just getting started.”
Quext and Homebase announced the acquisition on Tuesday. Financial details of the deal are not being disclosed.
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Homebase team members
While headquartered in Lubbock, Texas, Quext maintains a national and internationally dispersed workforce. Homebase’s current team — roughly 35 people, with all but one based in Kansas City — make valuable additions to the Quext family, the company said.
Quext expects to integrate the Homebase team into a common organizational structure as key contributors in the Quext enterprise. Along with Miller as CPO, numerous leaders from the Kansas City startup will resume leadership roles in this new common organization, according to Quext.
For Homebase — a smart building tech platform — work remains, Miller emphasized, no matter how their efforts are branded moving forward.
“There are barely one million ‘smart’ apartment units out there, with the definition of smart being very loose,” he said. “It’s incredibly validating and exciting to partner with a group like Quext to continue building out this vision of the future of living. We have the people, product and resources to impact housing in incredible ways.”
Quext and Homebase’s individual solutions are each both innovative and differentiated in the multifamily industry, Miller said.
By working to integrate the technologies, “this unified platform will enable customers to choose from Quext’s unique LPWAN-based network with an embedded thermostat hub, a Homebase-style hub-less WiFi network solution, or a redundant path combination of these services,” thus utilizing and building on the Homebase’s platform for fast and exponential development growth.
Click here to read a blog post from Blake Miller on how the acquisition reflects a new era of smart communities.
“I’m immensely grateful to our dedicated team, loyal clients, strategic partners and investors who over the years showed unwavering support while we did something incredibly hard: create a new category in tech with Connected Buildings,” Miller said in a Tweet announcing the acquisition.
