Can Former Xiaomi Exec's Startup Lumio Reboot The Indian Smart TV Market?

Just how many times have you thought of throwing a vase kept at an arm’s length or even the remote right at your smart television (TV) just because it lags too much, has a clunky interface, and hangs more than Windows 98 (millennials know the pain) while switching between applications?

Like many of us, first-time entrepreneurs Raghu Reddy and Kailash Sankaranarayanan faced these small but frustrating challenges while operating their not-so-smart TVs. Being a former Xiaomi India chief business officer (CBO), Reddy was more than familiar with this problem, having seen it up close.

However, in spite of couch potatoing alongside their pet peeve, they decided to do something about it. And, their quest started with a basic question — why is the smart TV experience broken and not as smooth as a smartphone or a laptop?

Little did they know that their curiosity would become the catalyst for their entrepreneurial plunge, triggering their foray into the massive Indian TV segment to rewrite the rules of the game.

“While smartphones and laptops now offer near-instant response times, personalised content, and seamless UI, smart TVs are clunky, slow and unintuitive. A laggy performance frustrates users and leads to a broken content discovery experience,” said Reddy, the cofounder of Lumio.

Founded in 2024 and launched in May this year, Lumio is a new-age electronics brand that specialises in smart TVs and projectors. With this venture, the founders aim to revolutionise the Indian smart TV market by offering premium products at competitive prices.

Speaking with Inc42, the founders said that while other consumer tech categories are rapidly evolving with faster hardware and smarter interfaces, the Indian smart TV space has little innovation to offer.

This is where Lumio comes into the picture, literally, with an initial lineup of six SKUs and a bold claim of transforming the TV experience in India — fast, efficient and free of crutches (think external dongles).

Launched with a pitch to solve for speed, Lumio has crossed a gross merchandise value of $1 Mn within just two months of its launch. The startup has also raised over $4.3 Mn from Stellar Venture Partners and 3one4 Capital in a pre-launch funding round.

Now, before we dive right into the inception story of a two-month-old TV brand that claims to lock horns with brands like VU, BPL, TCL, HiSense, Xiaomi, Panasonic, et al, let’s get well-versed with the founders’ backgrounds and what drew them into the world of startups.

The Veterans’ Paradox

With nearly two decades of experience in consumer electronics and having led business functions at Xiaomi and Snapdeal, Reddy knew the sector like the back of his hand. More interestingly, Reddy had seen Xiaomi’s rise first-hand. As the chief business officer at Xiaomi India, he managed product verticals and ecommerce operations.

Meanwhile, his college friend Kailash Sankaranarayanan brought with him over a decade of leadership experience from HUL and Flipkart, along with a deep personal interest in electronics.

In 2023, a casual catch-up between the two turned into a deeper conversation about the gaps in India’s smart TV sector. As regular users, they were disappointed by slow app launches, lagging interfaces, and outdated UX.

However, this was not enough to take action — they needed more data. Therefore, the friends analysed more than 50,000 user reviews across ecommerce platforms and found a recurring theme — performance.

“Whether it was a budget TV priced at INR 20,000 or a high-end model from a legacy brand, the issues were the same — sluggish navigation and outdated interfaces,” said Reddy.

He explained that while consumers had come to expect speed and responsiveness from modern devices, smart TVs are cursed with weak processors, bloated software, and poorly optimised hardware.

Besides, content discovery has been an unaddressed elephant. With too many OTT platforms and endless content, users often spend 20–45 minutes just browsing before deciding what to watch.

“This is called the Netflix paradox — too many choices, too little guidance — the second insight that shaped our product thesis,” the founders said.

These two pain points, speed and discovery, formed the core of Lumio’s launch in May 2025.

Let There Be Lumio!

The insights — speed and discovery — became the cornerstone of their thesis and gave birth to their company Circuit House Technologies in March 2024. However, the brand, Lumio, was officially launched in May this year.

To salvage millions of Indian households that are stuck with TVs that fail to keep up with modern demands, the founders began by benchmarking against the NVIDIA Shield TV, widely regarded as the gold standard in Android TV performance.

They then optimised Lumio’s performance around three key pillars:

• System on Chip (SoC): A high-performance processor that enables faster app launches and smooth rendering. 
• RAM & Memory Architecture: To prevent slowdowns during multitasking or while switching between apps like Netflix, YouTube, and Hotstar. 
• Wi-Fi & Network Chipset: Fine-tuned for India’s variable internet conditions, ensuring stable connectivity even with fluctuating bandwidth.

On the software front, the brand has partnered with Google and runs near-stock Android TV (Google TV) software that’s been deeply optimised for performance. This has helped the product reduce boot time significantly, enhance memory management to keep more apps running in the background, and implement intelligent caching and resource allocation based on actual usage patterns.

Currently, Dixon Technologies is manufacturing the brand’s products.

Reddy said, the brand has so far been able to outperform most top-selling models on metrics like app switching and boot time by 2X or more. It has already sold 3,000+ units in under two months and has an average rating of 4.4 stars on Amazon. “70% of buyers are Amazon Prime users and 40% of web traffic is from iOS devices,” the founder added.

What’s On Offer, Lumio?

In a crowded segment of TVs, Lumio aims to stand out by delivering fast speed, personalised content recommendations, and a user experience that feels more like a smartphone. Its product lineup includes the Vision 9 and Vision 7 Smart TV series.

The Vision 9 is a premium QD-Mini LED TV, while the Vision 7 is a powerful QLED model. Both series are equipped with the Boss Processor, 3GB DDR4 RAM, and DOPE Display, offering over 100% colour coverage and premium QLED technology.

The Vision 9 series is priced at INR 59,999 for the 55-inch model, while the Vision 7 series is priced at INR 29,999 for the 43-inch, INR 34,999 for the 50-inch, and INR 39,999 for the 55-inch variants.

This positions Lumio in the mid-premium price range. For context, 55-inch smart TVs from established brands like LG, Sony, Panasonic, TCL, and Xiaomi typically range from INR 41,000 to north of INR 70,000, depending on the features and display technology.

Apart from TVs, the brand offers the Minion Remote, which features a shortcut key with the TLDR button for quick content discovery. The TLDR app is tailored for sports lovers and music enthusiasts alike.

“TLDR puts everything you need at your fingertips, live matches, schedules, results, tournament standings, highlights, and post-match analysis, all wrapped in a smooth, easy-to-navigate interface,” said Reddy.

Recently, the brand has also launched Lumio Arc 5 and Lumio Arc 7, a compact portable projector series that runs on Google TV. Starting at INR 19,999 (Arc 5) and INR 34,999 (Arc 7), these projectors offer plug‑and‑play home cinema experiences up to 100 inches on any wall and are ideal for casual or portable viewing setups.

“Most consumers think that projectors cost around INR 1 Lakh and come with a complicated setup and require multiple add-on devices to make it work. We have solved this by creating an all-in-one device, with Google TV in-built for access to all the OTT apps, including Netflix, auto-keystone, autofocus, and built-in powerful speakers — no screen or external setup needed,” Sankaranarayanan said.

What’s Next For Lumio

What’s working for the brand is that its founders zeroed in on one problem and tailored their entire product range to solve it.

“For us, that insight has landed well. It’s allowed us to scale the business quickly, even in a mature and highly competitive category.”

The second big area where the founders have invested heavily is service. Even before launch, they spent over six months setting up the IT and physical infrastructure, training people, and preparing systems to support nationwide service. It has a service network spanning over 19,000 PIN codes, and has already served customers across 1,200+ pincodes.

“85% of customers get their TV installed on the same day or within 24 hours. And this isn’t just in metro areas. We have worked hard to ensure consistency of service across India,” Reddy said.

Currently in its early stages, the startup is not chasing ambitious growth targets. Instead, it is taking a step-by-step approach, starting with a sharp focus on Amazon as its primary sales channel, with plans to expand into other marketplaces in the future.

Lumio has also partnered with Urban Ladder to showcase their products to consumers in six cities, including Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Kolkata. While there are no immediate plans to expand retail operations, the brand is open to more such partnerships. Lumio has also been actively building its community through social media.

For the coming fiscal, the brand’s key focus will be investing in its in-house content discovery layer — TLDR. Currently, its TLDR feature supports cricket and football, aggregating everything from live matches to highlights, analysis, and tournament tables across platforms, making it easier for users to discover and access sports content without switching apps.

While Lumio’s early success in a saturated TV market can be attributed to its sharp product focus, maintaining the right balance between demand and supply remains its biggest challenge. As a new player, aligning inventory without overextending or underdelivering can be a constant hustle for the founders. Another major challenge for the brand could be delivering consistent service at scale.

It is important to note that while the consumer electronics industry space might offer a huge growth opportunity, TVs is quite a saturated segment, with players like Samsung, LG, Sony, VU, TCL, etc dominating the segment. Also, it is not everyday that one thinks of buying a television. In addition, in order to buy an electronic item as expensive as a TV, a customer will want to trust a more established brand than a new entrant. This makes us ponder: will solving one core problem be enough for Lumio to stand out?

[Edited by Shishir Parasher]

The post Can Former Xiaomi Exec’s Startup Lumio Reboot The Indian Smart TV Market? appeared first on Inc42 Media.