This story begins in April 2018, I (Daniel Kjellström, the one who is telling this story) had just switched jobs where I was previously working on air quality prototypes. At that time, I was looking for a hobby project to do after work, but I couldn’t really decide on what. I was quite keen on drones and I even bought a book, but then it hit me, “I have been working with air quality prototypes, I know what is being offered in the market. What if I develop an air quality monitor that features more sensor for the same price and significantly improves the user experience?” (which in my opinion is still a problem as products in general are sometimes too complicated to use or are not designed minding what the user actually wants and how are they going to use it). So that was it, I decided to start a company to develop air quality monitors, which is funny because if you ask me today this “company” was a hobby project that lasted 3 years, but at that time I would always say “I’m working on my company”. The next step was coming up with a name and find an available .com domain.You cannot imagine how many company and domain names use the word “bee”. The name Devward came up as my desire to express that this company would always work in the direction of development and innovation. So now it was time to recruit some people for the company. I first contacted my friend Cesare Caputi for the mechanical design and my lifetime friend Cristian Sánchez for the business, branding and marketing side of the company.
We started working and we had quite a few “interesting” first 3 years as we basically got nowhere. We spent all our time thinking about the product itself and planning as if we already had sales, but the funny thing is that we spent a lot of time and money on development without even validating our idea with the customer. We thought that we were developing a cheaper, more powerful and better air quality monitor which in its essence would be sold by itself as it would be a better option to what there was already in the market. Basically, “who wouldn’t want to buy our monitor?”. The truth is that we were just investing lots of money and time on a hobby without knowing it. This throughout they years brought a lot of frustration and after cancelling a project in 2020 with a B2B client and not finding our place at the LEAD incubator in 2021, we basically came to a point where we didn’t know what to do and how to continue. We had been confused on whether to focus on the B2C or B2B markets. While being at LEAD we started to talk to clients and investors and began to get feedback. Guess what, our idea was not as good as we thought or at least not as complete as it should be. Their main point was “an air quality monitor is nice but it doesn’t do anything to improve air quality”, which they were right. At the end, the reality was that an air quality monitor by itself fits in a small segment of the market. I spent June and July of 2021 working solely as electronics engineer and not doing anything at Devward as I needed to figure out how to continue. I would basically listen to startup and marketing podcasts while walking the dog and reading a book called “The Lean Startup”. This helped me to find our place again, plan our pivot and think how to carry this out. What we pivoted to was “Smart RoomHub”, a new smart product category based on AI which reinvents closed spaces, controlling ventilation, AC and heaters to improve energy efficiency, keeping a clean and healthy environment for work, study, workout, etc. The short-term goal was easy: start with the B2B market, present this concept to clients and plan a pilot program to test it before taking it to market.
Our passion is to contribute to society with our innovations while making Devward the perfect place for people to express themselves and to seamless combine both their professional and private lives.
We envision to simplify buildings while providing them with powerful skills in order to achieve proactiveness, flexibility, adaptability and intelligence. For us, we should interact with buildings as if they were another human. Buildings should work for us, take care of us and let us know what’s wrong with them.
Easy to explain, difficult to achieve; Your home, the safest place.
