Amazon buys smart home camera maker Blink
Amazon has acquired Blink, makers of a wireless smart home security camera. Blink announced the acquisition in a brief blog post on its website, and no financial terms were disclosed.
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Blink, founded in 2014 via a successful $1 million crowdfunding campaign, makes low-cost video doorbells and security cameras for indoor and outdoor use.
The products are battery operated and totally wire-free, which makes them relatively easy to set up and maintain compared to similar products on the market. More importantly, Blink's products are compatible with Amazon's Echo smart home lineup.
"As one of their distributors, we already know customers love their home security cameras and monitoring systems," Amazon said in a statement. "We're excited to welcome their team and invent together on behalf of customers."
Blink fits neatly into the e-commerce giant's latest push into the smart home hardware space. In October, Amazon introduced the Amazon Cloud Cam as part of the Amazon Key in-home delivery service. The camera gave Amazon a worthy alternative to Google's Nest, and now Blink could up the ante with the additional security component.
It's unclear how Amazon plans to utilize Blink going forward, but the startup is reassuring current customers that nothing will change, for now.
"If you own one of our systems, nothing changes for now," Blink wrote on its website. "We'll continue to operate under the Amazon umbrella selling and supporting the same great products you know and love. It's Day 1 for us at Amazon, and we're looking forward to seeing what we can deliver to our customers together."
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