iLumi

iLumi is a Bluetooth-controlled LED light bulb that lets you set color, brightness, and lighting schedules from a phone app instead of a wall switch. It was built by Swapnil Bora and Corey Egan, two University of Texas at Dallas graduates who started the company in Plano, Texas. Their idea was to pack a tiny computer and rechargeable battery into a standard bulb so a single light could shift through millions of colors and keep running briefly during a power outage.

The founders walked into Shark Tank asking for 350,000 dollars in exchange for 15 percent of the business. They demonstrated the app controlling the bulbs live, and Mark Cuban saw the bigger play in their wireless mesh networking technology rather than the bulb alone. After back and forth, Cuban offered the full 350,000 dollars but for a larger 25 percent stake, and the pair accepted his terms on the spot.

What made iLumi memorable was that the bulb was really a delivery vehicle for the mesh networking software underneath it. Cuban repeatedly pointed to that platform as the reason he invested. The product stood out in a crowded smart-home field because each bulb could talk to the others without a separate hub, which was unusual for connected lighting at the time the episode aired in 2014.

With Cuban behind them, the founders moved from a pre-revenue startup into retail, landing placement in chains such as Best Buy and Brookstone and reaching roughly 2 million dollars in sales. Bora, Egan, and Cuban later appeared together at the CES technology show in Las Vegas, and the company kept iterating on the bulb hardware and its companion app through the years after the show.

The business eventually shifted away from consumer bulbs. In 2019 it was renamed MeshTek Labs and refocused on Bluetooth mesh networking for commercial and industrial Internet of Things projects, with Bora continuing as chief executive. As of 2026 MeshTek is the active entity, while the original iLumi consumer bulb brand is effectively wound down and is no longer stocked through its old storefront.