On a mission to build a connected world where apps, devices, and people can network and talk to each other.

It all started when Ashish and Divya began their home remodeling project. Ashish decided that he needed a technology hobby outside of work, and began tinkering with the idea of a smart home. He bought various smart home products from around the world and found that while the individual gadgets worked great, they lacked interoperability. So the more he installed, the worse his smart home experience got. All he wanted was a home that provided him with unified “Connected Experiences”, rather than a myriad of isolated connected gadgets.

Moreover, Ashish and Divya were very uncomfortable that their house was filled with gadgets that were always streaming data from their house to unknown servers. The devices never sought any permissions, and given that the devices were headless, it wasn’t ever clear what kind of data was being collected and when. They realized that with the proliferation of IoT and Smart Homes, the demand for data privacy was on the rise. With research forecasting that 41.6 billion IoT devices will be generating 79.4 zettabytes of data in 2025*, this problem is no longer just about the home. Relying on legislative efforts like GDPR may not be enough, there had to be a better way, perhaps a technology solution!

Seeing this opportunity Manav, Johnny and Ashish teamed up to create COCO. They identified the main enemy of privacy being the centralized client-server architecture. This led them to create a secure P2P middleware that separates the data plane from the business logic and connects apps and devices into a mesh overlay network. They added a common language of communication on top of this middleware to allow for apps and devices to interoperate easily.

Using this decentralized communication network, data is owned by the users and nodes become the point of data generation and transfer. The network is open to only those that you choose to invite. This means that you are empowered with transparency and control over your private data, and any data shared with 3rd parties is anonymized.

Over time, what started as a hobby translated into a larger mission to build a connected world where apps, devices, and people can network and talk to each other without compromising anyone’s data privacy. For the developer community, we went ahead and created a home automation kit that is private-by-design, and is the first product to be “Buzzed on COCO”.

This hobby kit includes a gateway, sensors, and alarms that could be used by developer hobbyists and entrepreneurs. It is designed for deployment across any facility — homes, offices, schools, hotels, hospitals, and so on.

Using the COCO platform, our developers went on to buzz a network management application, a chat app, and a lighting app which are now available for download on the COCO Grove.

Now, our goal is to bring together a community of like minded developers that wish to contribute to the mission of building a world of privacy enabled ‘connected experiences’ using the COCO platform. We invite every person who has a passion for connectivity, to come and try out COCO, and together let’s realize the vision of a world where ‘Every Thing’ is connected.