APAC Issue 2 2018 Urban Property Australia

18 APAC / Issue 2 2018 , China’s Tuya Smart Announces Smart IoT Solution for U.S. Market NewU.S. solution transforms standard products into IoT products within days. Tuya Smart (Tuya), a China-based global IoT platform provider for enterprise businesses, has announced the launch of the U.S. version of its platform, a turnkey solution that helps U.S. manufacturers transform standard products into IoT products within days and upgrade traditional supply chains with artificial intelligence capabilities. The Tuya platform offers hardware access, cloud services and app development in an end- to-end process that, at its fastest, can create controlling apps within ten minutes, transform a standard product into a smart one within a day, and launch mass production within two weeks. The platform is further supported by big data capabilities that enable geolocation and environment- sensing features. All of these help manufacturers reduce their R&D cost and time to market, while gaining user behavior insights. All this improves the bottom line. Building on Tuya’s established position in China, the launch of its U.S. solution points to its ongoing efforts to export its capabilities to global manufacturers amid a strong growth in IoT uptake in the U.S. and worldwide. According to IDC, global spending on IoT is set to reach US$772.5 billion in 2018, up 15% from 2017, while the United States will account for US$194 billion. Currently, Tuya’s partners include Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple Homekit, Tmall Genie, and many others, making it the world’s only platform that connects these gadgets on a global scale. “From homes and schools, to offices and factories, smart living will become a norm in the highly connected IoT world of the future. Tuya hopes to be the ‘gateway’ to this smart world, serving as the AI and IoT catalyst for manufacturers and helping them to bring smart devices to consumers faster and more efficiently,” said Jerry Wang, Founder and CEO of Tuya. “We see tremendous business potential in the connected lifestyle, where data understands everyone’s needs, preference, and habits.” “The U.S. market is of significant importance to us with the popularity of the likes of Amazon Echo and Google Homekit,” said Alex Yang, Tuya’s Co-Founder and COO in charge of the company’s overseas expansion. “Both Amazon and Google are already our partners and we hope to bring our capabilities to more U.S. manufacturers via the launch of our U.S. platform at CES. This is part of our on-going commitment to the market.” Both Mr. Wang and Mr. Yang are among the several founding members of Tuya who worked for Alibaba previously and held key roles in the development of Alibaba Cloud, as well as O2O and QR code projects, all of which have evolved into the disruptive mobile payment technology that we now see in Alipay. Since its establishment in Hangzhou, China in 2014, Tuya has served more than 10,000 customers, including Energizer, TCL, Vivitar, Geeni and many others, in nearly 200 countries/ regions including China, U.S., Europe, Middle East, as well as Southeast Asian countries, and empowered products ranging from power accessories, lighting, and household appliances, to kitchen appliances, environmental and health, and surveillance equipment. The company now processes on average more than 20 billion device requests and six million AI interactions daily. The amount of data that it has accumulated through these interactions has reached 1PB (petabyte) - equivalent to more than 58,000 movies[2]. In October 2017, Tuya announced it had raised tens of millions of dollars in Series B funding from lead investors including China International Capital, Oriental Fortune Capital, New Enterprise Associates and Quadrille Capital, representing renewed interest in the investment on emerging Chinese technology companies as the country aims to become a technology powerhouse for quality growth. Headquartered in Hangzhou, Tuya has offices in Shenzhen and the Silicon Valley. It has data centers in Portland (Oregon, US), Frankfurt (Germany) and Hangzhou (China). After the U.S. launch, the company will look to Europe and Japan for future rounds of expansion.