Away from home and worried about burglars? Cocoon is your digital guard dog

Sanjay Parekh was on holiday skiing when his phone vibrated. It was an app alerting him that there was some unusual activity in his house. Parekh opened the app to watch a video clip filmed from the main hallway of his home. It showed a heavy parcel falling through the
letter box and landing on the doormat with a thud.  
The video was taken by a home security device called Cocoon, which listens for strange sounds in a house when the occupants are out and sends an alert to their smartphone if it detects anything untoward.

The device, which began shipping to 850 Indiegogo backers this week, will be available in the UK in May and is being launched in partnership with Zurich Insurance.The insurance giant will sell the product along with a home insurance discount.  
"The device is all about making people feel safe in their homes," said Parekh, a co-founder of Cocoon, the startup behind the innovative security system. "Knowing the device is monitoring intelligently 24/7 gives you great peace of mind."

Cocoon is the Leeds-based creation of five security and technology experts who were dissatisfied with home alarm systems. Dan Conlon, Cocoon co-founder who previously founded Humyo.com before going on to be engineering director at Trend Micro, became annoyed with traditional home security when a false alarm was triggered in his house. 
Conlon couldn't turn the alarm off, no matter how hard he tried. "He eventually had to get on a ladder and pull it off the wall," said Parekh. "The frustration led him to think there had to be a better way to monitor a home than a binary alarm switch, a technology that hasn't really changed in the last 25 years."

Cocoon is small, round and about the size of a tennis ball. It sits in a main thoroughfare of a home and can hear low frequency sounds inaudible to the human ear with such sensitivity that it can detect the slightest movement through walls and ceilings. Fitted with an HD video camera, a motion detector and temperature sensor, it is also machine learning and connects with a smartphone app to keep in contact with homeowners. 
Cocoon builds up a picture of how a home sounds, learning the normal patterns of movement so that it can detect abnormalities. It connects to a smartphone app that can receive alerts, stream live HD video and tell the device when residents are at home. 
"It automatically arms itself when you leave the house, and disarms itself when you return," said Parekh.
Cocoon works best when all residents have a smartphone. "If you're leaving a child on their own then our assumption is that they're old enough to have a smartphone." If you have someone staying who doesn't own a smartphone you might just have to dismiss a few alerts. "You can tell the system, 'It's OK, I've got my father-in-law staying for the weekend.'"
 When the security system detects suspicious activity it sends an alert to the corresponding app and prompts the owner to watch 30 seconds of live video before giving them the option to alert the police. The communication is end-to-end encrypted, meaning the unlock keys are stored on the security device and smartphone so the company cannot access any data about individual properties. 

The team at Cocoon is constantly growing. Having started with five people in May 2014, it now has 22 people working in Leeds and London. The idea was initially self-funded, but has now raised just under $4 million (£2.8 mn). The funding includes $3 million from Aviva Ventures and Breed Reply, an incubator for internet of things startups. Cocoon was the first investment from the new Aviva Ventures, a new technology offshoot from the insurance company of the same name. 

"It's highly appropriate that our first investment is with Cocoon - an exciting new business which combines a unique product, pioneering technology and a strong management team in a home security sector which is set for significant growth," said Ben Luckett, managing director of Aviva Ventures, when it launched in December. 

Aviva Ventures predicts the smart home market will be worth $35.31 billion (£25 bn) by 2020. 

In terms of growth, Cocoon's is focusing on its UK May launch and the US launch in June. "After the launch we might look into providing a monitored service where one of our staff will monitor the device for you," said Parekh.

The devices cost £299 and come with a free Android app. The iOS app should be released by July.