Qubo bets on-device AI can crack India's sub-2% smart-home penetration (interview)

Homegrown smart-home brand: cameras, video doorbells, smart locks, dashcams and appliances on its own IoT stack, cloud platform and AI models.

Smart-home AI that runs free on a ₹2,500 device wins a market where cloud-heavy rivals cannot cut prices — subscriptions at ₹149–399 a month monetize the base.

Built under Hero Electronix on the thesis, as Rajpal tells it, that products made for the West 'are not necessarily right for India' — different building materials, family structures and household security needs.

Paid AI Guard plans run ₹149, ₹249 and ₹399 a month over a free base; the line is expanding from cameras into air purifiers, with smart heaters and robot vacuums planned for this year and a water purifier possible. Qubo recently launched in the Middle East and is weighing a US dashcam push.

India's smart-home penetration is below 2% by Rajpal's estimate against 30–50% in the West and China — a market that stays closed until devices get cheap enough to try.

Running AI inference on the device removes the recurring cloud cost that makes low-price hardware unsustainable for cloud-first rivals.

The subscription layer (AI Guard) converts cheap hardware into recurring revenue without gating the core experience.

Owning the stack — IoT, cloud, apps and models in-house, with about 100 engineers — lets one catalog data model span cameras, locks and coming appliances.

Where cloud economics set the floor price, on-device inference is the lever that opens a low-income mass market.

As of October 10, 2026, Rajpal said smart heaters and robot vacuums were slated to launch within the year, the Middle East launch had happened recently, and a US dashcam entry was under consideration. He also pressed a talent argument: India can manufacture, he said, but lacks enough engineers who can design world-class products.