Currant’s new Smart Wall Outlet taps artificial intelligence — and voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant — to help save energy.
Home appliances waste more energy than you might think. Incandescent light bulbs consume 20 percent to 80 percent more electricity than energy-efficient alternatives, like compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and light-emitting diodes (LEDs). A single dishwasher, meanwhile, can draw over 1,800 watts per cycle.
That’s why Hasty Granbery, former director of software engineering at PayPal, in 2015 founded Currant, a Palo Alto startup devoted to creating smart home devices that reduce energy consumption. In November 2018, fresh off a $7 million funding round, Currant debuted its first AI-powered product — the Currant Smart Outlet. And this year, at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show in January, it’ll formally unveil the Smart Wall Outlet, an in-wall smart outlet similarly driven by machine learning.
“We are on a mission to help reduce the insanely high levels of energy consumption in the United States,” Granberry said. “To that end, we are thrilled to announce our newest offering in what will be a long line of energy-saving smart home and commercial products.
