We are Senic, a group of passionate engineers and designers that want to make smart homes easy, and fun to use for all age groups and people. We design and build physical controls like wireless switches or Muse Blocks, that let anyone control smart home products like Sonos or Philips Hue with ease. This is our story …

How we met

“Childhood friends and the next generation of the German Mittelstand”

Felix, Tobias and Philip (from left to right), the three founders of Senic, come from a long family tradition in designing and manufacturing hardware. Before Senic, the three friends worked on things like quantum computers and human computer interaction with companies like Audi, Merck, or the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. Philip and Tobias know each other from a scholarship program in which they worked for technology companies in Asia, while Tobias and Felix were friends from back home.

The Problem

A few years ago, we started seeing a concerning trend. We had dinner and one of our friends was spending the entire time on his phone. Physically he was there but his mind was not. We’re all culpable of the same issue, but it made us realize how bad it got. The smartphone has brought so much convenience and benefits to our lives but it has come with a number of negative side effects. “Attention Designers” at large tech companies design apps with human psychology in mind, and in a way that we spend more and more time in front of screens. Today, the average adult spends more than 8 hours a day in front of a screen and negative side effects like distraction, isolation and depression are on the rise. 

I wake up in cold sweats every so often thinking, what did we bring to the world

Tony Fadell, the man behind the development of the iPhone

 

We’re seeing this development everywhere including our smart home. The smartphone is great for things like seeing who’s at the door, but clicking through 10 steps to turn on a light switch is not a step forward but a step back. Voice is an amazing addition to help get away from the screen but it is also limited. Adjusting the volume using voice or using voice while your partner is asleep next to you is simply not a great option. Haptic devices, like the switches that we sell, are a great 3rd alternative next to the phone and voice. It’s not a question of whether one is better than the other but how to combine technologies in a smart way so they serve your well being. 

 

Our Vision for the Future

"Technological design with human need at its center"

That statement describes our vision as a company perfectly. A lot of people talk about a future in which we spend our days in a ‘meta verse’ or Virtual Reality (VR). While we see a clear use case for this, this is not how we would like to live in the future. We believe that technology should become omnipresent to support us with our creativity, relationships or relation but it should support us from the background. Therefore, we believe in an enriched reality in which technology is embedded in simple objects and surfaces around us, and supports us from the background, with humans at its core.

 

Our Team

This is the vision that we share with hundreds of thousands of customers and with our team of passionate designers, engineers and marketers. We come from a diverse background of computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and design, and want to create simple and reliable products that anyone, independent of their age, or technical prowess, can use.

Our partners

Building a hardware & software company cannot be done without the support of Amazing partners. That’s why we consider these partners part of our team and cannot leave them unmentioned.

We started our company through a startup accelerator called YCombinator and have since partnered amazing investors and partners from across Europe, North America and Asia.

We work together with amazing partners like Sonos, Philips Hue and Gira.

In order to turn our ideas into reality, we manufacture most of our products in Germany and interact very closely with our manufacturing partners, constantly collaborating on how to improve production and quality.

The result are products that are loved by many and have multiple awards like 2 red dot design awards and the German Design Awad. We also care a lot about sustainability. This is why we’ve moved away from printed manuals towards a purely digital experience and manufacture our packaging from grass which is bio degradable.

 

Our Customers & Community

Last but not least, we would like to mention our customers. None of of what we do would be possible without their support. While our time might sometimes be limited with a small team, we constantly try to have calls with our customers on what to improve and what to build next. Thank you guys for supporting our vision!!! You’re part of making technology more simple and natural!