Simpsonville Tech Company Launches Kickstarter Campaign

Sabai Technology, a Simpsonville maker of wireless routers, has started a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a new development project it hopes can revolutionize home and small-business networking.

Using the popular Kickstarter crowdsourcing platform, the company said it hopes to raise $50,000 for development of its open-source router program named JaiRo.

Sabai’s founder and CEO William Haynes said JaiRo could do for wireless networking what smartphone technology did for traditional cellphones, making it much more robust, scaleable, and powerful.

Kickstarter funds will go toward increasing the speed of development, as well as building and growing the online community for developers. Sabai expects to release an alpha version of the software for the developer community late this fall. Beta will be released in early 2014, with a full Version One release in late 2014.

“This is the product that could take us from a small, niche business to exponential growth,” Haynes said in a statement. “We have huge plans for this product. More exports, more employees — all great things for business in the Upstate.”

In the past three years, Sabai has launched multiple product lines and is on version five of Sabai OS, its flagship router product, according to GSA Business.

Haynes started the company in 2010 with a $500 investment as the only employee. Sabai now has 10 employees and a customer base of more than 8,000 globally, the paper reported.

"Jai" means "heart" in Thai and is used in common expressions of emotion like "dee jai" for happy and "jai yen" for calm, according to the company's Kickstarter site. The seeds for Sabai were sown in Thailand where Haynes and family lived for four years while building an international school. It was in Thailand that Haynes first started modifying routers and where the name Sabai comes from, as well. (Sabai is an expression meaning a sense of peace and tranquility), according to the website.

Sabai believes the network core can be a central hub for all of a family's online activities and a place to store and access digital media, home automation, privacy settings, and more.

"Ro" is simply short for router. "As advanced as JaiRo devices will be, they are still just a fantastic router. So together, JaiRo means 'heart router' — because JaiRo will become the heart of your home network," according to the website.

For more on the Kickstarter campaign, click here.