From Shark Tank to Smart Home Game-Changer

The kitchen is the home’s heart—but also its greatest fire risk.

In this IoT Leaders episode, Nick Earle explores how technology can make cooking safer without changing how people cook. Unattended stoves remain the top cause of house fires, but smart retrofits and better standards promise a shift from reactive to proactive safety.

Akshita Iyer explains how smarter knobs, automation, and data-driven monitoring can reduce risk, while US industry standards like UL push manufacturers toward built-in solutions. They also discuss the role of AI and device integration in the connected home.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

1. Why unattended cooking is the top fire risk
2. Retrofitting existing appliances for smart safety
3. How UL standards can drive industry change
4. Using data and AI to spot risky patterns
5. Building seamless connections with the Matter protocol

Tune in to hear how safety is becoming standard in the smart home.

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Transcript

Intro:
You are listening to IoT Leaders, a podcast from Eseye that shares real IoT stories from the field about digital transformation, lessons learned, success stories, and innovation strategies that work.

Nick Earle: Hi, this is Nick Earle and this latest episode of IoT Leaders is our first one to feature someone who has been on the US Show, Shark Tank. Her name is Akshita Iyer. She’s the founder and CEO of a company called Ome like Home without the H and it’s around a smart cooking knob for your stove or range. And you’ll hear the story, but you’ll also hear the journey. And very excitingly, you’ll hear from Akshita about how she’s been working with a standards body, a regulatory body actually in the US called the UL. And they are on the verge hopefully of getting the ability to control the stove remotely to stop it being accidentally left on, not turned on, but left on into the standard, which will then mean that it would be ultimately built-in. By the appliance manufacturers. So, it’s like a nest story for the thermostat, but for the cooking stove and the data point that makes this one particularly exciting, is what Akshita shares.

Something certainly, I didn’t know was that gas fires, cooking, stove, hobs, whatever gas fires stove fires are the number one cause of house fires in the US, so this is a really big deal and despite her turning down the offer on Shark Tank, she’s carried on and has got a successful business.

So, I think you’re going to really enjoy this. Let’s get going with Akshita Iyer, who is the CEO and founder of Ome. Enjoy.

So, Akshita, welcome to the IoT Leaders Podcast.

Akshita Iyer: It’s a pleasure to be here, Nick. Thank you for having me.

Nick Earle: Well, we’re delighted to have you and actually you’re setting a bit of a record. You are the first guest that we’ve had who I could see from your background have actually been on Shark Tank. Now that’s a story.

And if you don’t mind, I wouldn’t mind starting there. I mean, we’re going to be talking about smart appliances, particularly controlling cooking stoves and the smart knob and a whole bunch of stuff. But before we go there, we can I think I’m right in saying that in 2018 when your company, you’re an entrepreneur, and when your company was actually going under a different name. You went on the US show Shark Tank, and you didn’t get a deal. They offered you the wrong deal and you walked away. Have I got that right?

Akshita Iyer: Yeah, that’s right. It actually kind of came full circle because I originally was just a religious Shark Tank watcher.

I loved the show. I loved the power of seeing your non-traditional entrepreneur, right? People who didn’t have your engineering or, you know, MBA backgrounds just solving their own problems. And it was in that time period when my mom accidentally left the stove on, started a kitchen fire, and because of the show I was like, oh, I can solve for this.

Like, why, why can’t I build a device that can help my own family? And then, you know, maybe six months later after we started Shark Tank reached out and it was a wonderful experience. More so because it really gave me the push to go and figure out how do you build a startup. And I think that’s really the power of the show, whether you get a deal or not, is just giving, you know, anyone the courage and the push to go and build something that’s very impactful.

Nick Earle: One last question on that. Ours is called Dragons Den over here. It’s just got a different name, but it’s the same show and sometimes they’re like five minutes, sometimes they’re 10 minutes. But I’m assuming that your time when you’re actually in front of them is a lot longer than that.

You’re on your feet probably for quite a while, right?

Akshita Iyer: Yeah, we were in the tank for about 90 minutes and there’s no time limit, so you could be in the tank for hours, it, you’re in the tank until everyone goes out. And so, you only see, five or 10 minutes of it.

But we’re in there for a while just having a conversation with all of the sharks and them getting to know us and the technology and the company better. It’s not as short as you might think.

Nick Earle: Okay, enough of that. So, let’s move on, on to your company which is called Ome. And we’ll get into what you do and as you say, it started off on a personal story with your mom.

Actually, there was a fire, right? Did she leave the gas on for too long or something, or?

Akshita Iyer: Yeah, she just left the burner on low, and it happens all the time where, you know, you take something off, you put it back on, you don’t realize it’s still on and you get distracted.

And then fortunately we had gotten back in time before it had spread beyond the kitchen, but it really was a reality check that one, my parents are getting older and this is something everyone struggles with. And two – the smart home was really exploding at the time. Nest had just been acquired, all sorts of smart devices, making your home safer, retrofit right door locks, doorbells, thermostats.

And I just went down a rabbit hole of what is the appliance industry doing to solve for the number one cause of house fires, which is unattended cooking.

Nick Earle: And I’m glad you mentioned Nest because when I was researching your company and I looked at the website.

And let me know if I’ve got this wrong, but my understanding is that you have the cooking, the range, the stove with the knobs on, let’s say it’s in the kitchen at home, and it, you replace one of the knobs, right? And it becomes a smart knob. And then, and it uses WiFi and it can communicate to smart device.

And so you as a relative of perhaps an elderly senior person can monitor. Their behavior and actually control the stove. Is that right?

Akshita Iyer: Exactly. So this is it, the knob looks like a regular knob. And yeah, like you said, you just retrofit. So you take your knob off, you put our knob on, just like you do a nest thermostat or a doorbell or a door lock, and you use your stove like you do all the time, right?

You push; you turn. Nothing about how you cook changes. But we have a bunch of proprietary technology and sensors in here that can detect when the burner’s turned on, which burner’s on how long it’s been on for. And as you said, we have a motor that can automatically turn the burner off if you leave it on for too long.

And anyone can monitor from anywhere at any time. You can turn the burners off if you need to. The only thing you cannot do for safety reasons is you cannot remotely turn a burner on. So you have to physically be there to push and turn.

Nick Earle: Right. That makes sense. You don’t want people setting fire deliberately other people’s houses.

But I was just thinking when we talk about senior living, and we’ll get into. And we as Eseye have a bunch of customers the companies who, you know, they B2B2C, and they they’re in this space. In fact, we’ve done at least two podcasts in the series with them. But I was thinking in my own life, we’ve all had that moment—driving away and wondering if the stove is still on. Once it’s in your head, yeah, you can’t stop thinking about it. You have to turn around. You have to go back.

Akshita Iyer: Yeah. You can’t, you have to turn around.

Nick Earle: You have to go back.

Akshita Iyer: Yeah.

Nick Earle: So, there’s multiple uses, but what we’re talking about here is a real issue. You mentioned very briefly there that it’s the number one cause of kitchen fires or house fires.

Akshita Iyer: House fires.

Nick Earle: I didn’t know that. That’s interesting. The number one cause and there was a big wasn’t there a big product recall? At least in the US I don’t know if it was global recently.

Akshita Iyer: Yeah, so two of the largest appliance manufacturers recalled close to 2 million ranges last year because of accidental knob turn on meaning you know whether it was a person, a pet, or a kid accidentally turning the knob on.

And either gas or, you know, the actual burners turned on and starting cooking fires. And so there, this has always been a problem. Insurance companies pay a billion dollars a year. Because of this problem. So it’s not that, you know, it just started, but all of a sudden there was this emphasis and priority on making sure that we find a solution for you know, unattended cooking and this accidental knob activation because you know, it can happen to anyone.

So the now the standards are changing. There are UL regulatory standards that are updating to ensure that appliance manufacturers build in technology into these stoves and ranges to make sure that this is no longer a problem because it is very preventable.

Nick Earle: I wanted to explore that.

We have listeners all over the world, literally almost a hundred countries bizarrely now, and you did use that phrase, UL, so I did want to and I asked you that during the prep, and I wanted to just explain it as I understand it because it’s not a well-known phrase, I don’t believe or acronym I don’t believe outside the US. But that’s a standards body, isn’t it?

Regulatory. Standards body. Maybe explain a little bit about what UL is.

Akshita Iyer: Yeah. UL stands for Underwriters Laboratories, and they are a third-party testing body that has created industry standards for consumer electronics. Includes your appliances, and so every appliance that you buy is UL tested and approved and will have a UL symbol somewhere on the appliance, or if you buy it online will have it there.

Which is basically saying that this has been tested to ensure consumer safety and. What hasn’t been included in the standards is, you know, safe automation, right? So making sure that these kinds of scenarios, you know, like accidental knob turn on that there are measures to prevent that.

And only until these recalls happened has UL now said we need to solve for this, right? Because it’s very clearly affecting consumer safety. And these standards take time to evolve. They don’t, they’re not completely comprehensive and it just takes these different scenarios to make sure that the standards are evolving with technology.

And one thing that hasn’t been included is remote operation of your surface cooking appliance. And so I am on the technical committee, the standards committee for the specific standard that oversees your ranges and your surface cooking appliances. And we do have language coming into that standard that will ensure that this accidental knob activation, this safety piece of cooking fires and the reason behind it, will hopefully be solved for so that this is not something that we have to worry about going forward.

Nick Earle: So that’s a pretty big deal, isn’t it? We speak to a lot of people who have got a great idea who’ve been entrepreneurial and managed to get a product to market. That’s a very difficult thing. I’m sure we’ll come back to that. That’s not easy at all. Hardware is called hardware for a reason but if the standard changes, as you say to stop accidents happening and to be built into the standard, then that would be huge for this part of the market.

And would mean that future products would, I guess hopefully from your perspective, would have to be designed with this proactive as opposed to reactive capability built into them in some way. I mean, they won’t mandate your solution, but you will be one of the leading solutions to say we’re compliant.

Akshita Iyer: Yes, the appliance manufacturers will need to do something. Sure. Of course that can come in a variety of forms. I think the benefit that we have is that we do have a fully built, tested de-risked solution that is ready right now. We built this to be universal, to work on the vast majority of stove tops and ranges out there.

But the next step for us is really now catering this solution spec to specific models, right? And to specific brands so that we can make that control and even make that adoption a lot easier, right? Imagine, partnering with appliance manufacturer where every time you go to buy an appliance that our technology’s already built in. And as you mentioned, what this update to the standard does is basically, a stamp of approval from the industry that our mechanism of being able to turn a burner off when there is a risk present is a safe way to do and until now, that hasn’t been written into the standard. So there was no way for us to get that UL certification. But that does change and it is a huge step for us as a company because it basically gives us a pathway to a much bigger impact and to deploy this at a much bigger scale.

Nick Earle: And you mentioned nest. I wanted to double click on and unpack that a little bit. And just listening to you there, I mean, that would be really a big deal even when that standard gets published. And I know that there’ll be a long adoption cycle, but the fact is that the future direction would be determined because I was thinking about Nest.

Nest is pretty cool, and we will talk about learning and tracking behavior and AI, but you don’t have to mandate Nest because a Honeywell, a 15-year-old Honeywell thermostat works okay. I mean, there’s no safety angle there, but you’ve got something here that if it’s the number one cause of house fires.

Then mandating a technology that would actually enable you to proactively monitor, proactively adjust, look at pattern recognition, maybe even, let’s talk about that because let’s say, my parents are not alive, but I say hypothetically, say my mom was still alive when she was alive, she would leave the gas on all the time.

And, and the first time we heard about it was actually the notification through the smoke detector, which is a little too late, right? In fact, it really is too late. The house is on fire. Should we worry? But at least lots of smoke in the kitchen. So if I was monitoring her and I knew that she made a cup of tea at a certain time of day. Maybe she was living on her own or an assisted living, or she had access to a stove. Could I start to through my device, see patterns and set rules perhaps as to what’s unusual and what’s normal? Is that sort of the idea?

Akshita Iyer: Yeah, absolutely.

First and foremost, if you know that. Your mom doesn’t use the stove. She’s making tea. She probably isn’t using the stove for more than 20 minutes, right? You can set rules to say that if any burner is left on for more than 20 minutes, automatically turn it off and then send you notification.

You don’t need to do anything because the device itself is going to turn off, but it’ll also let you know that hey, it was left on. And I think this is where data becomes very interesting for smart devices. To use their data to be able to predict, I, that you like the temperature of your home, at 68 degrees at 10:00 PM Right.

And automatically will adjust that. And so for us, you know, similarly, what we’re working on now is, especially for older adults and in the context of senior living communities, can we use that data to understand what. Someone’s general activity looks like, right? Yeah. So they usually cook.

You know, your mom usually makes tea at 11:00 AM so if the stove is turned on at, you know, 1:00 AM probably not right?

Nick Earle: Yeah.

Akshita Iyer: So then just automatically turn it off.

Nick Earle: And you can then take proactive action. Exactly. Maybe phone someone can you go and check and it’s part of an overall trend of IoT where the data ultimately is more valuable than the product. And what about the interaction? I know there’s a general a standard called matter M-A-T-T-E-R. Because the key thing is going to be, I mentioned the smoke detector, but the smart homes are going to have eventually everything connected.

Yeah. And so, the interaction between the devices is really key. Is that where the Matter standard is really important for you?

Akshita Iyer: Yeah, absolutely. I mean to what you said, the smart home hopefully will get to a point where all these sensors take action and talk to each other. For example, when you set your security system to ‘away,’ meaning you’ve left your house, it could automatically check to ensure the stove is off. That requires some crosstalk between all these devices. Unfortunately, you have 20 different apps that aren’t talking to each other, and you have to check manually. That’s interesting because [Matter] is a protocol that unifies all of these devices in the smart home under one roof, allowing them to communicate seamlessly. And so far we don’t have anything like that that can take devices made by different companies. It’s one thing if you have devices that are all, Amazon or Nest, but all these devices that are made by different companies to then in talk to each other. And I think that’s super important for us to have a much more seamless consumer experience and then also for that proactive smart home to be a reality without that.

No one company or no one product can do everything we’re talking about. Right. It’s an end user experience.

Nick Earle: Yeah. We have in our house we have Nest, the Amazon nest. Cameras and indoor-outdoor video cameras. And then we have these smart plugs in case, you must have them in the US as well.

I think they are made in Asia, these smart plugs. And so we have an app for that. And each morning and each evening we have to go into two apps, and we have to ask, is this on and this off? And you want, look, it’s morning. This is my morning settings.

Is Amazon one of the companies that will align with Matter, or do they have their own standard?

Akshita Iyer: I believe that most of the Amazon devices are or will be Matter certified. Amazon, even though they are maybe, I would say probably one of the leaders in the smart home, I think they still don’t have everything. So, I still believe that every company one day, I think Matter’s probably the leader in unifying all of these devices that they will and every other company will be Matter certified. It’s a protocol, right? So basically, you just need to make sure that your software can support multiple protocols.

Nick Earle: But I think I asked you because I wasn’t sure of the answer, but I think they’re one of the companies because there’s such a battle going on for the home hub because there’s a lot of companies trying to control the home.

Google being another one. That would make a lot of sense. And back to the data. The interaction, so you’ve got the interaction between the devices, like the smoke alarm or, and the cooker or stove. You’ve got the wouldn’t it be cool if when you put your alarm system on or off, there’s a set of settings that would be automatically applied. You know, sleep mode, away mode home mode. And then there’s the whole AI possibilities. One of our previous podcasts just to, I often link the podcast together on these because now that we’ve done over 50 of them, we had a medical device company really early on who had created their own hardware.

And the idea was to turn; we talked about proactive to reactive. The idea is just healthcare in general is very reactive. You know, you feel ill for about three days after you catch something and then you go to the doctors, you have to wait – at least over here in the UK – you have to wait for an appointment. And then you see a doctor and the doctor says, yes, you’re ill. I know I’m ill. And may you have to go and see a specialist and you wait for three weeks to see a specialist. Anyway. By the time you, you see someone, the chances are you’ve got better. But the idea of that’s the reactive process, but the idea of being proactive is that it takes my Fitbit that I’ve got on, or a Whoop or whatever else they get, or the Apple Watch, it would predict when you’re going to be ill based on your measurements it’s taking, but the guy was saying, the CTO, that it isn’t just the six sensors or the eight sensors that’s now being pressed against your wrist from your device. It all the different combinations based on your age, your heart rate your blood pressure, your previous history, your weight.

It’s that combination, billions of permutations to determine whether it’s a problem or not. Whether you should take proactive, you know, call 911 straight away or you know what, you’ve just drunk and eaten too much. Take it easy. And so, and it seems to me like the home is a really great example of that because as everything gets measured, there’s going to be context around everything else.

That’s in the home and what’s going on, and I guess there’d be too many combinations for you to program it through your smart app. Yeah, you don’t want to do the if then else stuff, you know? So is that the area where AI could really make this super intelligent?

Akshita Iyer: Oh yeah, absolutely.

I think just like, you know, you’re mentioning with health, basically, you know what these sensors that you wear are doing is they’ve already been trained with billions of data points that exist. That they know, okay, if you’re 42 years old and you weigh this much, like this is what your general, you know, health or activity or reading should be.

But then it caters to you as you use it. And so I think in the home you know what is already happening is and just like we’re doing for cooking activity is taking historical data, right? All of the devices we have out there to, and we can see, right, how often people cook what, you know, age, demographic they are, and do they cook more in the evening?

Do they cook more in the morning? But then that becomes more precise, the more you as a user use it right? As we understand, okay, well this is what generally someone your age does, but now we know how you use it. And so, you know, if sometimes you, you know, for you cooking at 11:00 PM might be okay, right?

Yeah. And so it’s really training that. Data over time, starting with the baseline but then training that data over time to then curate it for you. And so I think the smart home, to what we were talking about earlier of, matter and you all these devices, being able to talk to each other, you need all of that information as we were mentioning earlier, to give you a holistic picture.

Yes. Right. Just one part of the home or one device alone is not going to do it. It has to be a full suite of products and ecosystem as we, you know, like to say of devices that are giving you all these data points and then you need that AI, that machine learning to be able to read it, to correlate things together, and then create action or insight from it.

Nick Earle: And it actually doesn’t even need to be in, just in the home, doesn’t it? Because it could be your barbecue on your deck. The same principle. Have I left it on? I’ve done that before. Now that’s a good way of emptying the gas bottle is to leave it on overnight. And so lessons learned.

It’s a great story. You know, as we started. Shark Tank to now seven years. You’ve sold thousands of these and there’s hopefully something really big coming, which is the standard which we talked about. It’d be huge, massive. And then you’ve got the whole smart home and everything being integrated.

And the fact that what you could do with the data is just so exciting. The lessons learned, as an entrepreneur, you don’t have an engineering background. So it has been amazing to get to where you’ve got to so far. Can I ask you what were some of the most difficult things were looking back?

Akshita Iyer: I mean, it’s only in those difficult time moments that you learn, right? And I think, you know, fundraising, you know, as you do as well, right? Raising money you know, you have to be a salesperson. How do you story tell and get people to resonate with what you’re building.

And it took me a while to figure out, you know, how to tell this story in a way that someone can identify with. But two, that from an investor standpoint actually shows that there is opportunity here, right? No one has ever built something like this, but curating a pitch and telling that story I think was hard in the beginning, but it’s a skill, right?

You build over time. It took me a while to figure out how to hire. And you know who to hire, and I’m not an engineer, so managing engineers was really challenging. I think what I learned there was, you’re always trying to be in a room where you’re not the smartest person. Right.

Because if you are, then probably something’s wrong.

Nick Earle: You’re in the wrong room. Yeah.

Akshita Iyer: And I think that was probably one of the best things is just constantly learning. You’re just a sponge of just being around people who have done something that you need to do, and can kind of give you that guidance.

And I think also I would probably, the last thing I’ll say is. Just rejection. Again, back to storytelling and, you know, founders, entrepreneurs are salespeople at the end of the day, and you get rejected, you know, 99 times out of a hundred times. But I think, you know, trying to shift a mindset to, “okay, that’s okay.”

You said no. Why did you say no? What can I learn from this so that hopefully the next time I can get a yes. You just kind of keep doing that and you just keep putting one foot in front of the other. And if you’re coachable and you’re willing to learn and make mistakes, and it’s okay if you fall, you get back up then, then it becomes a much easier journey in that way of just staying positive. There are a lot of things I would do differently in a next company, but I’m glad about all the ups and downs. I’m glad I went through, you know, the last seven years way that I did because I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Nick Earle: I think it’s a great story. It’s a great achievement. It’s a great entrepreneurial story with some very honest and open lessons at the end. And you know, as a father with two daughters, I think it’s a great female entrepreneurial story and I think it’s tough. It is tough doing all of those things.

And but it must be even tougher. And the fact that you’ve fought your way through. I’m cheering you on in terms of that standard because I just know how important that will be. I mean that would be huge if it was built into the standard. Maybe one day I’ll read that and I’ll think I remember talking to her.

Hopefully soon. I’ve got one last question before we finish: is your product only – we have a lot of global listeners – does it only work in on us appliances right now?

Akshita Iyer: So, no, we only sell in the US right now just because selling overseas takes a lot of resources and you know, just there, there are a lot of regulatory bodies also overseas that we don’t yet want to tackle on our own. And that’s where the standard working with, you know, strategic partners like your appliance manufacturers who already do sell in other markets.

Nick Earle: Maybe that was the question I should have asked. So, thank you for reminding me.

If it’s a direct sell, it’s real tough to scale and a direct sell, but if the standard comes out it, I guess from your point of view, the ideal scenario would be you basically designed in.

Akshita Iyer: Yeah, exactly that.

Nick Earle: That’s jackpot. Yeah.

Akshita Iyer: Yeah. Because our goal was in building this technology and utilizing the retrofit model was that we know that there are millions and millions of homes out there that are not going to buy a new appliance for quite some time -10, 15, 20 years. And so it was a good intermediary for us to prove that look, this works. This is something that’s needed. We’ve built a solution that that can be done safely and that can automate safely. Now though, when you look into the future, what we really want to do is make sure that we can integrate in, because at some point everyone’s going to buy a new appliance.

And that is the next piece, like along with this standard that’ll help propel us to getting this into every home, whether it’s in the US or in another country. And these manufacturers already have the supply chain, the infrastructure. I mean, as you mentioned earlier, hardware is hard building prototypes and you know, early production is fine, but then when you start building in the tens of thousands. It’s a big endeavor. And I think not only that, but in just getting the reach that we want it’s really important that this now becomes just a built-in integrated solution.

Yeah,

Nick Earle: We’ve done a lot of podcasts on that subject of people who think hardware is easy. It’s not actually, I think it’s a great story. As I say, I’m rooting for you. I hoping I read about the standard. But either way smart Knob and I know it’s Smart Knob 2.0 is next, second generation is a great idea and not just a great idea but something, one of those use cases where you can very easily and instantly see the benefit for humanity if you like. I mean, we’ve done several around emerging markets and the problems of getting water and electricity to people. We’ve done several around care homes and those typically get a lot of very good feedback because people say, well, there’s a lot of IoT use cases, but some of them are so obscure I can’t relate to them this.

You know, it started off with the mom and a fire in the kitchen. But this people can relate to is the ability to do pattern matching and the app and whatever. So, it sounds like a really cool thing. Thank you so much for being my guest on IoT Leaders.

If people want to reach out to you, we have a lot of listeners in the US. Do they go to your website? How do they reach out?

Akshita Iyer: Yeah, you can go to our website or on LinkedIn. You can share my name; you can certainly message me there.

And then we also have a Support email: support@omekitchen.com. So, any one of those, feel free to reach out. We’re always eager to hear from potential customers and just anyone with perspective.

Nick Earle: Yeah. Great. And that’s Ome as in O-M-E, like home without the H. Good to talk to you.

And thank you again for being a guest on IoT Leaders.

Akshita Iyer: Thank you so much for having me.

Outro:
You’ve been listening to IoT Leaders, featuring top digitization leadership on the frontlines of IoT. We hope today’s episode has sparked new ideas and inspired your IoT and digital transformation plans. Thanks for listening. Until next time!