May 28, 2025

The OS of Lighting: A Note from Casambi CEO Mark McClear

There’s a lot of noise in the smart lighting world right now. Bold claims. Flashy demos. Promises of revolution. But beneath all the marketing buzz, how much is really scalable, interoperable, or future-ready?

I’ve been in this business a long time, and I’ve seen the patterns. Dozens of companies have tried to build wireless lighting control solutions. The formula’s almost always the same: buy a radio chip, spin up an app, slap together some modular hardware, and launch a website.

They look promising at first. But they all hit the same wall.

Each ends up boxed into a narrow slice of the market:

One lighting application – maybe warehouse, residential, or office
One geography – Germany, the UK, the U.S., Asia
One go-to-market channel

These are closed, proprietary ecosystems built around a handful of SKUs – maybe 20 at most – customized for a single use case and local electrical code. It works, for a while. But when the ambition grows – to support real projects, scale globally, or adapt to complex customer needs – these companies collapse under the weight of their own complexity.

Casambi is doing something very different.

We’ve taken the opposite approach. We’ve built an open ecosystem – with more than 2,000 Casambi-enabled SKUs that are fully interoperable. Our platform is used in every lighting application you can think of: architectural, retail, hospitality, residential, street lighting, and beyond. It works in over 150 countries. And it’s available through trusted, local sales channels.

This is not a tech experiment or a closed club. It’s a living, growing network. Our partners – more than 300 Casambi-Ready companies – don’t just sell products. They succeed because they’re part of something bigger.

The question isn’t whether BLE lighting control works. It does.

The real question is this:
How many BLE control platforms can your sales team actually learn, support, and explain to customers?

If you’re a luminaire manufacturer trying to juggle multiple BLE solutions across markets, verticals, and geographies – you’re probably already feeling the pain. There’s a better way.

With Casambi, you get one platform. One global ecosystem. Every application. Everywhere.

This is why we call Casambi the Operating System of Lighting. It’s smart software. Clean hardware. Easy installation. And it just works – whether you’re lighting a museum in Paris or a logistics center in Tokyo.

Let’s cut through the noise. The future of lighting control is open, scalable, and built on collaboration.