Luko Water: the sensor that never shipped
How far did Luko’s water-leak sensor actually get? Short answer: it reached a beta with a couple of hundred customers in 2022, was publicly announced as launching at scale in 2023, and then the company collapsed before that happened.
I worked on the flow sensing for this device: an ultrasonic flow meter, made cheap enough to give away, by new flow sensing algorithms. This page records what became of it, from public sources.
Background: three sensors, one pack
Luko was founded in 2016 as a hardware company first and an insurer second — smart home sensors for risk prevention, originally pitched to other insurers before the founders decided to build their own insurance product. Three devices were planned, mapped onto the three biggest home-insurance claim categories.
| Device | Purpose | Fate |
|---|---|---|
| Luko Elec | Clips to the electricity meter; real-time consumption, detects dangerous appliances left on (fire prevention) | Widest deployment; development stopped mid-2021 |
| Luko Door | Sticks to the front door; analyses movement and vibration (theft prevention) | Paused late 2021 |
| Luko Water | Clips to the incoming water pipe; leak and consumption detection (water damage) | Beta only; never launched at scale |
The October 2019 hardware update by Brieuc du Maugouer, Luko’s hardware lead, is the clearest snapshot of the peak of the hardware effort. Elec and Door were both at 200 prototypes and about to enter a three-wave beta; a first commercial wave of 1,000 packs = 3,000 pieces was planned once CE certification cleared. Luko Water appears in that post only as still in R&D.
- Où en est-on sur nos technologies de protection ? — Brieuc du Maugouer, Oct 2019 (French)
- [UPDATE] Luko technologies and where we are on it — the same post in English
Late 2021: Water becomes the only survivor
Two years later, CEO Raphaël Vullierme published a candid retrospective on three years of hardware.
- Elec was made redundant. France’s Linky and Gazpar smart meters exposed APIs, so Luko could pull consumption data directly. The app has done that since June 2021 — no sensor needed.
- Door was conceded. Luko decided others were better placed to build burglary and intrusion sensors.
- Water was doubled down on. Water damage is the most frequent claim type in France, and R&D was furthest along. The target was to prevent about 25% of water-damage incidents nationally.
The lesson stated in the post: hardware is hard and expensive, and giving away a high-value product free with an insurance policy creates a mismatch between the effort spent and the value customers attach to it.
- Retour sur 3 ans de développement hardware : changement de stratégie — Raphaël Vullierme, late 2021
June 2022: the launch announcement, and the high-water mark
Luko announced Luko Water publicly. The technical approach had settled on ultrasound: a sound wave sent both ways along the flow, with the difference in travel time used to derive the flow rate in the supply pipe. That gives real-time consumption and leak alerts, including hidden leaks in walled-in pipes that floor-level flood sensors miss. It clipped onto the pipe: no tools, no plumber.
The announcement was explicitly pre-commercial:
- 200+ beta testers evaluating the device
- The latest prototype described as close to the final target
- Two hurdles left: machine learning to sharpen leak detection, and simpler installation for a mass audience
- Plan: large-scale launch in 2023, eventually equipping all Luko policyholders, about 300,000 people in France
That 200-tester figure is where the trail ends. It is the same order of magnitude that Elec and Door had reached three years earlier.
- L’assurance Luko lance Luko Water — Clubic, June 2022 (sponsored content)
- Après Luko Elect et Luko Door, Luko Water — L’Assurance en Mouvement, June 2022
2023–24: the company runs out of road
The 2023 launch window coincided almost exactly with Luko’s financial unravelling.
- 2022 — Luko acquires the German insurer Coya and the French rent-guarantee startup Unkle, then fails to raise the round meant to fund them. A contract clause triggers a €12M debt to Unkle’s shareholders.
- June 2023 — Luko enters procédure de sauvegarde. Admiral Group agrees to buy the company.
- November 2023 — Admiral withdraws after due diligence; Luko is placed in redressement judiciaire.
- 24 January 2024 — The Bobigny commercial court approves the sale of certain assets, including the brand, to Allianz for €4.32 million, and converts the receivership into liquidation. All 112–113 staff transfer to Allianz Direct.
For scale: Luko had been valued at over €250M in its 2020 Series B and had absorbed around €72M from investors.
- Unpacking the end of Luko’s solo journey in insurtech — TechCrunch, Aug 2023
- L’assureur en ligne Luko finalement repris par Allianz — L’Usine Digitale, Jan 2024
- Luko (entreprise) — Wikipédia (FR), for the corporate timeline
- Luko Acquired: the story of an InsurTech shooting star in France — astorya.vc, an outside read on the IoT wind-down
Where it stands now
Luko survives as Luko by Allianz Direct, a commercial brand of Allianz’s digital arm. The hardware programme is not part of the offer.
One loose end: some pages on the current Luko site still mention a water-meter sensor for leak detection and real-time consumption. That reads more like surviving legacy copy than an active product, but public sources do not make it fully clear whether any limited deployment continued through the acquisition.
The one-line version
Luko Water is a case of a product that was technically nearly finished and strategically correct — it was the right sensor to bet on, aimed at France’s most common claim type — but whose commercialisation window fell in the same quarter that its parent company entered insolvency proceedings. It never got past a few hundred beta units.
Compiled 17 August 2026 from public sources. Medium serves the French Luko posts behind a sign-in wall; the English translations are more reliably reachable.