Announcing Ome: Our Story
By: Akshita Iyer
Tags: Smart Home, Hardware Startup, Startup, Female Founders, Entrepreneurship

Today, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Ome.

Until now, you’ve known us as Inirv — we build smart technology to help you cook smarter and live better. We’ve created the first connected device that can turn any gas or electric stove into a smart appliance in minutes. Our Smart Knobs seamlessly replace your existing stove knobs so you can monitor and control your appliance with ease, from anywhere. You can set cooking timers, make sure your stove is off after you leave the house, and remotely adjust burner settings. Ome Knobs even automatically turn off your burner if you leave it on by accident!

While we’ve learned so much as Inirv, “Inirv” as a name itself never quite encompassed our vision and a lot of reflection went into our decision to rebrand as Ome. It’s derived from “Om” — a sacred Sanskrit symbol and sound that signifies peace and tranquility. Our mission is to create experiences that bring “Om” to your home every day.

More on our rebrand soon, but for now, I’d like to take this moment to share how far we’ve come. Because we’re just getting started.

let’s begin…at the beginning

My road to becoming a consumer hardware founder was a bit unconventional. I was a neuroscience major at Duke, narrowly focused on what I needed to do next to secure my degree and become a doctor. That is until a personal experience — right at home — led me down a different path.

During my gap year working at Duke Hospital, my mom started a house fire because she left the stove on by accident. It wasn’t the first time the stove was left on and I knew it wouldn’t be the last. I needed a solution. My parents were getting older, they were cooking every day, and I had to make sure they could continue to do the things they loved at home without worrying. In my search for solutions, a huge problem came to the forefront — unattended cooking is still the #1 cause of house fires. To me, that made sense. How many times had I gotten distracted and left food cooking for just a few minutes too long? Chicken overcooks, boiled eggs explode, or veggies burn.

I stayed up night after night thinking about the problem. The kitchen is so behind in technology while the rest of the home is saturated with smart devices that bring safety and convenience to everything we do. I noticed companies trying to build new smart appliances, which puzzled me. How’s that going to work when appliances last for decades? Not many people have the means to spend thousands on new appliances when the ones they have work perfectly fine. So why aren’t we learning from what’s worked in the smart home already? Think door locks, doorbells, and thermostats. Why not modernize the kitchen through retrofit? It’s worked everywhere else! I pulled in my husband to brainstorm and this concept sounded like a slam dunk. Even though we had little idea what building something from nothing would entail, Ome was born.

rejection as an aid

When we started, our thought was “How hard can it really be to create a smart stove knob?” You need plastics, a motor, a battery, and a circuit board. Easy! In many ways, I’m glad we were blissfully unaware of the challenges we would inevitably face but I can certainly appreciate that thought now. At the time, I truly didn’t understand the complexity of starting a business, creating a product from scratch, or how to build the infrastructure necessary to support that business for the long haul. We were also the first to bring something like this to market — there was no other smart knob to test, inspect, or research.

For two years, we bootstrapped. We didn’t have funds for any full-time resources so we utilized contractors to get to our first “working” prototype. But limited resources meant piece-mealing things together, which meant there was usually (okay, always) something that didn’t work. Firmware, the app, mechanical issues — it seemed if one thing was working, it was guaranteed something else wasn’t.

As we slowly got to our first prototype, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity presented itself — Shark Tank. This really felt full circle because we were Shark Tank watchers for years, and it was because of the show that we had the courage to take the entrepreneurial leap in the first place. With some stroke of luck, we made it through the audition process and found ourselves swimming with the Sharks. We spent over 90 minutes going back and forth, ultimately getting offered a deal but for more equity than we presented initially. And boy, it’s so hard to turn down money sitting right in front of you, especially when you’re perpetually riding on the edge of a cliff. But our visions didn’t align. We believed in our business and where it could go, so we turned the Sharks down and walked away empty-handed.

I always get asked whether I regret that decision and in the moments after exiting the Tank, maybe. But hindsight is always 20/20. Ultimately, that was one of the best decisions we ever made. We were still developing, trying and failing at the whole startup thing and attempting to conquer a massive learning curve. If we had taken that money then, we wouldn’t have utilized the capital the right way and certainly not the smart way. More importantly, turning it down allowed us to gain perspective and a renewed mindset. We were forced to find ways around our obstacles, think outside the box, and build the resilience that allowed us to see another day. I believe that sometimes, capital can blind a founder and I’m thankful for experiences like this one that pushed me to see things clearer.

On the plus side, the visibility from airing on the show allowed us to hear from thousands of potential customers to refine our product and how it works. We listened, asked questions, and iterated quickly. Shark Tank gave us a direct line to our future customers that changed the game in more ways than one.

Post-Shark Tank, however, we still had no money, no team, and no clear path forward. We had to (re)start, somewhere, somehow.

learn as you go

Fundraising. The lifeblood of every startup; the bane of every founder. I had no understanding of how to navigate the capital raising game, not to mention how to do it successfully. I started pitching to hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of angel investors, VCs, accelerators, and pretty much anyone who would give me a minute of their time — for nothing ever to come through. For years, I heard “no,” after “no,” after “no.” I got every reason for a “no” you could think of — “too early,” “hardware’s hard,” “there’s no market,” “I don’t cook, so who would use this,” etc etc. It took me a while to recognize and make the necessary mental shift from a founder asking for investment, to a founder presenting an opportunity. Once that mindset changed, the responses did too.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before any “yeses,” as I was still wading through rejection, I also had to figure out how to manage highly technical engineers as a “non-technical” CEO. I was just a few years out of school and never worked in a corporate environment, managed a team, or built a product as technically complex as this one. I wondered how I could be an effective manager while also learning how to build and grow a business. Hindsight again — team. I was fortunate to find talented engineers who didn’t mind stumbling with me as I learned the ins and outs of product development, from working in sprints and managing supply chain to designing a PCB and building AWS architecture. As a remote workforce using primarily Slack and Zoom, it was most certainly rocky at first. I still have a lot to learn but I’ve grown into the leader I am today because of a team that believed I could get here, investing the time to educate me whenever possible. And it’s here that I would like to say: Thank you to my lean but mighty powerhouse — Hans, Terrance, Will, Phil, and Rich. I’m humbled to work alongside you every day.

purposeful persistence

In all fairness to investors who said “no,” on paper I didn’t make sense. What business does a neuroscience grad have building a smart home startup? Well, resumes aren’t everything. We’ve managed to build and ship a connected hardware product on just $1.5M of outside capital (if you know hardware, you know this isn’t much). We’ve built countless prototypes, rebuilt firmware code from scratch, navigated the global chip shortage and still, we’ll have thousands of devices in homes by the end of the summer. And that’s not even the best part. Despite all the setbacks, I’ve somehow found investors who understand and embrace me and my vision. I now have an incredible group of both men and women (woo!) around the table, supporting me every day through the inevitable trials and tribulations of launching, growing and scaling this business. Thank you to our investors — Outlander, Halogen, Zane, Techstars, Crescent Ridge, Third Act, igniteXL, Techsquare and our angels for seeing something in me that I likely didn’t see in myself. I’m grateful to continue building Ome, together.

We have much more to share in the coming months, but for today I’d like to end with a few more overdue, heartfelt thank yous. Thank you to my partner Ranjith, my family, friends, advisors, mentors, and fellow founders for helping me navigate these hard but rewarding years. There are many more successes and failures to come, but because of your encouragement and guidance, I feel more prepared than ever to lead Ome through this next phase of our story.

Finally, thank you for taking the time to read this. I’m so proud of how Inirv has evolved, but even more excited for what Ome will become. We’re about to turn up the dial in the kitchen (pun definitely intended) and hope you will continue to follow our journey.

- Akshita

CEO & Cofounder, Ome

akshita@omekitchen.com