Technology company Xiaomi announced recently at its annual MIDC conference a strategic partnership with IKEA, the Swedish furniture company.

IKEA’s full range of smart lighting products will be connected to Xiaomi’s IoT (Internet of Things) platform starting this December in China. This marks the first time IKEA has partnered with a Chinese technology company.

The Xiaomi IoT platform has connected more than 132 million smart devices (excluding mobile phones and laptops), and has more than 20 million daily active devices in more than 200 countries and regions around the world as of Sept. 30. This is according to data released at the conference by Lei Jun, founder, chair, and CEO of Xiaomi Corp.

Xiaomi Xiao Ai voice assistant has cumulatively been activated on about 100 million devices, with monthly active users exceeding 34 million and cumulative wake-up times exceeding 8 billion.

“IKEA and Xiaomi share very similar values and I believe our cooperation will accelerate the development of the smart home industry across the world,” said Fan Dian, general Manager of the IoT platform department of Xiaomi.

Starting in China in December, IKEA’s full range of smart lighting products will be connected to Xiaomi IoT platform and can be controlled via Xiaomi products, including Xiao Ai voice assistant and the Mi Home app. The lights can also be paired with other Xiaomi IoT smart devices such as sensors and electrical appliances for smart scene management. The smart lighting products will be connected to Mi Control Hub through the ZigBee protocol.

In addition to IKEA, Xiaomi also announced in-depth cooperation with Ji Hotel, CHJ Automotive and Ikongjian, an interior decoration company. These partnerships involve a full range of Xiaomi smart IoT devices that can be applied to different scenarios.

Further opening up AIoT possibilities for third-party developers

Since the inaugural MIDC conference in 2017, Xiaomi has been developing initiatives for developers to take advantage of the opportunities in AI and IoT. The Xiaomi IoT Developer Program was first launched last year, giving third-party developers access to the Mi Home platform for controlling smart home scenarios with cloud + AI + big data capabilities.

In the past year, over 1,000 third-party products have successfully been incorporated to the Xiaomi IoT platform, which has accumulated over 1,000 enterprise developers and more than 7,000 individual developers, allowing Xiao Ai voice assistant to perform over 1,300 types of tasks. Xiaomi has also started new initiatives for developers to take advantage of the opportunities in AI and IoT.

This year, Xiaomi continues to open up AIoT possibilities. The company announced at the conference that it will invest RMB 100 million to build the “Xiaomi AIoT Developer Fund,” which will be used to support AI developers, hardware equipment manufacturers, and AI technology companies.

Xiaomi also released Mi Smart Door Lock, which adopts integrated 3D live fingerprint recognition. It also supports six unlocking means including password, NFC and Bluetooth.