Amazon Acquires Smart Door Bell Maker Ring

[Julio Urquidi]

For a Reuters-reported price of over $1 billion, Amazon upped the stakes for its competitors in the smart home security market by buying video doorbell maker, Ring. The acquisition of the motion sensing/video recording/app notifying camera company is the second largest purchase in Amazon’s history (Whole Foods was purchased for close to $14 billion).

Originally called DoorBot, Ring’s founder, Jamie Siminoff, started the Santa Monica company in 2011, and has since grown the business from creating a single product that fulfills the simple need of seeing who is at your door, to getting publicity from an episode of Shark Tank (Siminoff walked away with nothing), some crowdfunding, and then getting even more money from Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, G. Sachs and others, including Amazon’s own Alexa Fund.

Amazon, already in the smart home market for a while thanks to its Alexa digital assistant, also bought a Ring competitor, Blink, in late 2016. Around that same time, the Jeff Bezos-run mega-retailer, released Amazon Key, a packaged service consisting of Amazon’s delivery services, a smart lock, and Amazon’s own Cloud Cam to facilitate at-home and in-home package deliveries. With the Ring acquisition, Amazon is further fortifying its place in the cloud-based smart home market, upping the ante for Google Home/Nest and Apple Home.

There’s no word yet on how Amazon will incorporate Ring’s brand and technologies into its own branding, but speculation is that the Ring brand will stay independent, like other recent Amazon acquisitions of the past.