UGREEN HomeAgent: Local AI Smart Home Hub Hits Kickstarter

UGREEN is betting that the next big thing in smart homes isn’t another cloud subscription — it’s a hub that keeps your data inside your own walls. The accessories and NAS maker has opened pre-orders for its HomeAgent, an “Agentic AI Local Hub” that fuses a Matter/Thread smart home controller, a network-attached storage box, and a security camera recorder into a single device. The headline act: a built-in local large language model and voice assistant called Uliya that processes commands entirely on-device.

The company will take the HomeAgent to Kickstarter on October 27, 2026, with a Super Early Bird price of $899 for the base HA100 — half off its $1,799 retail price. If the pitch lands, it could become the most ambitious privacy-first answer yet to a year dominated by cloud AI assistants.

What the HomeAgent actually is

UGREEN calls the HomeAgent an all-in-one local hub, and the hardware spec sheet reads like three products bolted together. On the smart home side, it speaks Matter, Thread, and Wi-Fi, connecting gadgets from brands including Philips Hue, Aqara, SwitchBot, Nanoleaf, and Govee. Per UGREEN’s official compatibility list, Matter support currently covers gateways, lights, switches, sensors, curtains, smart plugs, smart locks, and robot vacuums, while cameras connect through ONVIF. Routines can run across device types — cameras, speakers, locks, sensors, lights, and blinds — without sending a single command to the cloud.

The intelligence comes from Uliya, UGREEN’s on-device LLM, activated by saying “Hi Uliya.” Beyond basic device control, the system can interpret contextual requests — checking live device statuses, setting custom alerts like a notification when a baby is crying, and proactively pulling meaningful moments from camera feeds. UGREEN says the hub can recognize people, pets, and vehicles, then automatically assemble highlight videos of family moments to display on its companion Gallery smart frames.

The storage half is equally serious. The HomeAgent carries three SATA 3.0 bays — two NAS bays for SSDs or HDDs plus a dedicated NVR bay for camera footage — along with an M.2 NVMe slot. Everything runs on UGOS Pro, UGREEN’s new Linux-based operating system, and is managed through the UGREEN NAS app. It promises the familiar NAS toolkit — remote access, file sync between devices, real-time protection, version history, and an encrypted vault — plus media streaming and even optional links to Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox. In effect, UGREEN is selling a private cloud that happens to also run your home.

Three models, three tiers of AI muscle

UGREEN is launching a family, not a single box:

• HomeAgent HA100 — the entry model, with 16 GB of RAM, 64 GB of eMMC storage, and 26 TOPS of AI processing power.
• HomeAgent HA100 Pro — 205 TOPS of AI performance, more onboard memory and storage, and built-in 10 Gb networking aimed at homes with many cameras and heavier AI workloads.
• MasterAgent MA100 — the flagship, powered by NVIDIA’s Jetson Thor T5000 and rated at up to 2,070 TFLOPS of AI performance, with a list price near $20,000. Developers will reportedly be able to build custom skills for it.

UGREEN is also building an ecosystem around the hubs: SynCare cameras, a dedicated smart speaker for the Uliya voice assistant, and the Gallery LCD smart frames.

Pricing and the road to Kickstarter

Pre-orders are open now through UGREEN’s AIoT store. A refundable $50 deposit locks in the Super Early Bird price of $899 for the HA100 (50 percent off the $1,799 MSRP) through October 26. From October 27 through December 10, the Kickstarter campaign prices the HA100 at $1,079 (40 percent off). Shipping is staged between January and July 2027.

A few caveats worth noting. The HA100 requires at least two hard drives to initialize — one for NAS storage and one for surveillance — and those are purchased separately. UGREEN also notes that while AI processing happens locally, account registration, remote access, mobile notifications, software updates, and optional cloud services may still require an internet connection. And notably, Home Assistant support is not yet available, which will matter to the open-source crowd.

Why local AI hubs are having a moment

The HomeAgent lands in the middle of a broader industry shift toward keeping smart home intelligence on-premises. This year has already seen EcoFlow push AI into home energy management, Home Assistant expand local Matter controls, and Nanoleaf open its lighting platform to local AI agents. The common thread: homeowners are tiring of subscriptions and cloud outages, and edge chips are finally fast enough to run useful models without a data center.

UGREEN’s pricing argument is direct. Cloud-based AI hubs increasingly gate features like AI event summaries, threat detection, and natural back-and-forth conversation behind monthly plans — Google’s Gemini AI on Nest hardware, for example, runs through a Home Premium subscription starting at $10 per month. With Uliya running locally, there are no monthly fees. The trade-off is the steep upfront cost: $899 buys a lot of Echo Shows.

There is also a responsibility shift that comes with owning your data. When footage, voice commands, and automations never leave the home, their security becomes the owner’s job — keeping the hub’s firmware and the home router updated is essential, since an exposed local hub is a juicier target than a cloud account.

Outlook: a credible privacy play, with crowdfunding risk

On paper, the HomeAgent is one of the most complete local-first smart home packages announced this year — a credible counterweight to the cloud-AI direction taken by Amazon, Google, and Apple’s rumored home hub. If UGREEN delivers the Matter compatibility, the on-device intelligence, and the NAS chops it promises, it could carve out a real niche among privacy-conscious households and NAS enthusiasts.

But it is still a pre-order. Kickstarter campaigns ship late, specs shift, and $899 is a serious commitment for hardware that won’t arrive until well into 2027. Anyone tempted by the Super Early Bird pricing should weigh the deposit against the usual crowdfunding risks — and against the reality that Matter and Thread already let you build a solid local setup with a far cheaper hub today.