Amazon Aims To Advance Smart Home Technology With Stake In Homebuilder
Summary
As it looks to gain momentum in smart home technology, Amazon ( AMZN ) on Tuesday said it invested in Plant Prefab, a maker of prefabricated custom single-family and multifamily houses.The $6.7 million funding round was joined by Obvious Ventures, a firm co-founded by Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter.The investments comes as Amazon, last week, announced a bevy of new products that expands its line of Echo smart speakers and connections to smart-home devices, all controlled via the artificially intelligent Alexa.Based in Rialto, Calif., Plant Prefab was spun out of LivingHomes , a design and development company that also builds prefabricated homes, in 2016.Amazon already has a deal with Lennar ( LENB ), the nations largest homebuilder, to pre-install Alexa devices in all the companys new homes, announced in May.