Kevin by mitipi Qorus Innovation in Insurance Awards 2018 - Winner

Kevin by mitipi is your virtual roommate who lives at your place when you are gone. He protects your home by simulating presence with lights, shadow and acoustics. It appears like someone is at home - even when you are not. Kevin makes it look like someone is moving around naturally and taking care of everyday tasks. The risk of a break-in can be reduced dramatically, because the one thing burglars want to avoid is breaking into a house when the victim is at home. Setting up Kevin is easy: the user only needs power and a Wi-Fi connection. With a companion app, the user can enter their preferences. The simulation will take those preferences into consideration, as well as external data points such as weather data or time zone. The algorithm then decides which daily activities would make sense to play when. We have a week’s long database. Kevin will activate himself as soon as the user leaves their home. The user can also choose not to connect Kevin to the internet. He won’t be able to define preferences, and a standard simulation saved on the device will be played. Moreover, the user will need to think of activating the device via the buttons when leaving home. The idea of mitipi has started in the Helvetia Innovation department. The first idea was to improve the reaction after a burglar has broken into someone's home. Early customer interviews then revealed that psychological damage is the biggest problem for victims and thus break-ins need to be prevented. Competing burglary prevention methods are mostly manual and do not offer a holistic plug-and-play experience like Kevin. The solutions are often static, so that a burglar would find out quickly that there is no one at home. The functional prototype was launched in January 2018 and presented at CES in Las Vegas. Shortly after, Kevin by mitipi raised over CHF 100'000.- funding on Kickstarter, reaching 215% of the initial funding target. Kevin has been pre-sold over 535 times already and production of the final product will be finished and delivered in Q4 2018. Target markets are Switzerland, Austria, Germany, UK and USA because the product will be available in German and English. Burglars fear people, not cameras! With Kevin by mitipi we want to create a world where the term "burglary" can only be found in history books.