June 1, 2016

 Uponor Corporation (Uponor) has announced the formation of Phyn, a new partnership with Belkin International. Phyn represents the next wave of the smart home and will create an intelligent water solution that protects family homes and businesses from leak damage, enables mindful conservation, and enhances household water usage with automated and anticipatory controls.

“Plumbing has essentially provided the same function for centuries,” says Bill Gray, president, Uponor North America. “And while it will continue to provide that essential function, we believe that real change is finally coming. We must find a better way to use our water more intelligently and with purpose.”

“Water is a precious and vital natural resource, but there has been a fundamental lack of technology dedicated to protecting and preserving it — especially for home users,” says Chet Pipkin, founder and CEO of Belkin. “With the creation of Phyn, we’re bringing water up to speed with the rest of the smart home, helping to not only protect consumers’ homes and wallets, but also do our part to solve the very real challenges facing our global water supply.”

The technology offered by Phyn will create an intelligent water system that will benefit an even broader audience beyond the homeowner. Builders can provide higher value as part of their smart-home offering; insurers can reduce their number one claim frequency and the number two paid-claims dollar amount — estimated at more than $1 billion annually in the U.S. alone. Utility companies can avoid costly investment into infrastructure by eliminating water loss and waste. Engineers can gain water-use statistics across a broad customer base as units become installed in hundreds of thousands of locations. And plumbing professionals can increase services offered and monitor and mitigate leak concerns of their customers.

This is a partnership between two companies, leaders in their respective fields. Phyn will be a standalone company featuring Belkin’s proprietary water-sensing technologies, expertise in data science and the Internet of Things (IoT) and will also offer agile product design, consumer insights and a global retail channel. Uponor will bring its leading position in plumbing expertise, professional insights from the trades and a global wholesale distribution channel.

Uponor and Belkin have agreed to establish two joint venture companies. The first one will operate in the U.S. and the second one in Europe, at a later stage. The U.S. joint venture company will be headquartered in the Los Angeles area with a research and development lab in Seattle. A number of Belkin engineers will transition to the new Phyn team. No timetable has been set for the first product launch.