Dutch startup Homies secures the homes of low-income households

Households in low-income neighborhoods have a 60% bigger chance of home-burglary or fire. These people feel really unsafe but often lack the money or power to do something about this. Dutch startup Homies wants to take care of this lack of security and therefore designed a simple, social and affordable home security solution.

The peer to peer alarm platform connects innovative security solutions to prevailing messaging apps such as WhatsApp. “Because Homies is funded from reduced claims, we can offer our clients a very affordable solution together with social housing corporations”, Milou Slots, founder of Homies, states. Homies, not to be confused with Athom’s Homey, is part of Achmea and Accenture helped them developing the product. Ymere is a first customer.

How does Homies work?

Slots: “We developed a device with different sensors, like infrared, noise, air pressure etc. By combining these data, and using smart algorithms we can detect whether someone is present in the house. When the system is armed (a client can arm the system by using our app) and the device detects the presence in the house, an alarm will be triggered.”

Where do you stand now, in terms of development?

“We just ended our pilot phase with 400 households and are now ready to scale. We have already three of the biggest housing corporations signed, so in the coming months, we will start with making more neighborhoods safer! Besides this, we just launched our b-to-c proposition so everybody can buy Homies now. We actually already prevented a fire. One of our pilot customers forgot he had a pan on the stove and left his house. The neighborhood was warned by the homies alarm system, went over to the house, saw smoke, and called the fire department. Because the fire department was on time, they were able to rescue the dogs and prevent the house from burning down.”