Why we built Stovyn

A young Indian woman, far from home, died in an apartment fire in the United States. The fire started in her kitchen. By the time the smoke alarm went off, the apartment was already burning. She didn't get out in time.

Kitchen fires are the leading cause of home fires in the US, and unattended cooking is the leading cause of those. The smoke alarm worked. But all a smoke alarm can do is tell you the room is already on fire. By then you have minutes. Sometimes less. People who are tired, distracted, asleep, or alone don't get those minutes back.

I wanted a product that warned earlier, watching the heat itself, not the smoke after the fact, and that reached somebody when no one answered at home. Instead I found products that drilled into your range hood, replaced your stove knobs, or quietly streamed your kitchen to the cloud. Many claimed AI the hardware couldn't deliver. None were honest about the gap.

So I built Stovyn on three rules I refuse to compromise on:

• 1.Honest about what it does. Stovyn senses heat per-burner and listens for whistles. It doesn't recognize what you're cooking, and it isn't a smoke alarm replacement. We say so on the box, in the manual, and in our Terms.
• 2.No video streaming, ever. Standard has no camera. The Pro camera is event-triggered, not a stream: with the optional cloud AI on it sends a single snapshot to our cloud AI provider for analysis and we keep only the result, not your image. Thermal sensing stays on the device. Our Privacy Policy holds us to it.
• 3.No drilling, no rewiring, no compromise. Adhesive or magnetic mount. Battery-powered. Wi-Fi only when it needs to send an alert. If you can put up a picture frame, you can install Stovyn.

Stovyn won't replace your smoke alarm. It won't call 911. It won't know the steak is medium-rare. It does one thing: stand between "I forgot something on the stove" and "the kitchen is on fire." That gap is where the real disasters happen. And when no one answers at home, Stovyn calls the people they trust before the fire becomes one.

We're based in Hyderabad, India, manufacturing through Seeed Studio in Shenzhen, shipping first to the US through Amazon. Small team, deliberately independent, so we never trade the privacy promises above to please an investor. We built this for the families I most want to protect: students living alone overseas, elderly parents whose children are far away, anyone whose support network is one phone call away.

If you have feedback, a partnership idea, or you spot us claiming something the device can't actually do, write to me directly. I read every email.

, Prabhakar