This NAS company wants to run your local smart home

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy reports from IFA 2026 that Ugreen, known for power banks and NAS boxes, launched HomeAgent: a hub that combines security-camera storage, on-device AI, and smart-home control under a local-first voice assistant called Uliya. Three hub tiers store data locally and process video on-device, with no monthly storage fees of the kind common to Ring/Alexa and Nest/Gemini for Home.

Early-bird pricing runs from $899 for the HomeAgent HA100 to $2,999 for the HA100 Pro and $9,999 for the Nvidia Jetson Thor–powered MasterAgent MA100. Kickstarter opens in October; Ugreen suggests prices roughly double afterward. Cameras (SynCare indoor, PoE, and battery outdoor) and a Matter controller round out the stack. Competitors in the same aisle this week include Anker’s Eufy MindBase, plus earlier moves from SwitchBot, Reolink, and Aqara.

Signal Desk’s read: this is the local-smart-home pitch arriving as a product category, not a hobbyist stack. The commercial logic is familiar — trade recurring cloud fees for a fat capital outlay and keep footage and files inside the house — but HomeAgent’s bet is that on-device AI is now good enough to sell that trade to people who currently pay Amazon or Google every month.

The tiering is the tell. The base HA100 is framed as rule-based automation with specific voice commands; the Pro adds semantic, context-aware understanding; the MA100 puts Jetson Thor T5000 compute (Ugreen cites up to 2,070 TFLOPS) under the hood. That ladder says Ugreen expects buyers to pay for inference locality the way they once paid for hard-drive bays. A $9,999 early-bird hub that may roughly double post-Kickstarter is not a mass-market Nest killer. It is a proof that the company will sell privacy as silicon.

Caveats in the Verge hands-on matter more than the booth demo. Push notifications and remote camera viewing still need internet. Uliya can optionally use the cloud. Compatibility is Matter-based in theory, but the published list is small (Aqara, ThirdReality, SwitchBot, Eve), and phase one covers lights, switches, sensors, and curtains — with advice to stick to approved products. Local-first without a wide device surface is a NAS with a voice overlay.

Who gains if this works: households and small offices that already want a NAS and hate camera subscriptions. Who loses if it stalls: the narrative that local AI hubs are “just around the corner” for everyone. Integration and setup — Tuohy flags both as the success conditions — will decide whether HomeAgent is a category opener or another expensive box that demos well under show lights.

IFA 2026 is crowded with local AI hubs; Anker’s Eufy MindBase landed in the same news cycle. The broader pattern is Matter as the interoperability promise and on-device models as the privacy pitch, while remote features quietly reintroduce the network.