An alarm company that changed its name to describe a home.

Vivint is a smart-home and home-security company based in Utah. It did not start under that name. VentureBeat, reporting in September 2012, said the business was founded in 1999 as APX Alarm Security Solutions, and Vivint’s own press release of May 2025 also dates its launch to 1999, describing the early company as “a home security solution provider.” English Wikipedia names the co-founders as Todd Pedersen and Keith Nellesen and places the start in Lehi, Utah.

The early business sold and installed security systems. The change of name came in 2011. VentureBeat wrote that the company “rebranded to Vivint” that year with investment from Goldman Sachs, and Vivint’s 2025 release says that 2011 was when the company expanded into proprietary smart-home and automation services. The name itself was built to carry that shift. In the company’s words, Vivint is “a combination of ‘vive,’ which means ‘to live,’ and ‘intelligent.’”

In September 2012 VentureBeat reported that Vivint had signed an agreement to be acquired by the investment firm Blackstone, buying from shareholders including Goldman Sachs, Jupiter Partners and Peterson Partners. The same report said the company was based in Provo, Utah, and that Vivint Solar and 2GIG Technologies were part of the package. Vivint Solar, a residential solar business, later went its own way; Sunrun announced in October 2020 that it had completed its acquisition of Vivint Solar.

The security company itself went public in January 2020 through a merger with the special-purpose acquisition company Mosaic Acquisition Corp., listing on the New York Stock Exchange, according to the Deseret News as cited by English Wikipedia. Its time as a listed company was short. Vivint says it was acquired by NRG, the Houston-based energy and home services company, in March 2023. NRG has owned Vivint since then, and the 2025 release describes Vivint as “now part of NRG.”

Installed systems, an app and a home that talks back.

Vivint’s products sit across the house rather than at the door alone. English Wikipedia lists cameras, locks, safety sensors, thermostats and lighting among its product lines, along with the monitoring and installation services that go with them. English Wikipedia, citing TechCrunch, says that in May 2015 the press covered the launch of a new Vivint home-automation system that included a small doorbell camera, and, citing TechHive, that in January 2017 coverage turned to Vivint Sky, the company’s smart-home platform. The common thread is that the hardware is fitted by the company’s own people: the 2025 release speaks of the company’s commitment to “white-glove professional installation and service.”

That model shapes how a customer meets the brand. Many people encounter Vivint first through a technician, a control panel on the wall and an app on the phone, rather than a box on a shop shelf. The identity has to work on a small screen, on a uniform, on a van and on a yard sign at the same time. A name of six lower-case letters, with no initials and no crest, is easy to carry across all of them.

Partnerships have widened the system. Wikipedia, citing CNET, says that in January 2017 Vivint and Airbnb were working together so hosts could connect their accounts to Vivint products, and, citing TechHive, that in June 2018 Vivint was bundling two Google Home Mini speakers with its starter kits. Since joining NRG the company has added energy to the story: the May 2025 release presents Vivint as a brand for “smarter security and smarter energy management,” with the home rather than the alarm at the centre.

The brand has also lived outside the house. English Wikipedia records that Vivint held the naming rights to the Utah Jazz’s home arena in Salt Lake City between 2015 and 2023, when the building was known as Vivint Smart Home Arena and later Vivint Arena. For a company that sells mostly through installers, a name on a basketball arena gave it a public face in its home state.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make or sell things that sit at the edge of a home: alarm systems, monitoring services, door locks, keypads and garage-door openers. Home-security and smart-entry brands in general come from very different starting points, from old hardware makers and monitoring companies to younger firms built around an app, and many of them have changed owners, merged or been folded into larger groups along the way.

In this category a brand’s identity is carried as much by a sticker on a window, a keypad by the door or an icon on a phone as by the device itself, and the company behind the name may make, buy in or simply resell the hardware. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its name and marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

APX Alarm, Blackstone, the NYSE — and NRG.

The most detailed public account of Vivint’s visual identity comes from the company itself. On 5 May 2025, under a Lehi, Utah dateline, Vivint announced a new brand identity that it presented as the start of a new era for the smart home. The release describes a new logo built from a mix of shapes: “rounded elements & terminals portray human and approachable,” while “squared terminals and linear components signal thoughtful and precise.” The company says the wordmark “carries the familiarity of the prior identity but with a more approachable and human touch,” so the change was an evolution of the existing lower-case name rather than a new word.

Alongside the wordmark sits a new home icon, which Vivint says “conveys the idea of intelligence coming into the home.” For a company whose name already joins living and intelligence, the icon makes that idea literal: a house shape doing the work that the name does in words. The pairing gives the brand a symbol that can stand on its own on an app tile or a small device screen where a full wordmark would be too wide.

Colour changed too. The release describes a refreshed palette of six new colours meant to convey growth and optimism while recognising the brand’s heritage, and it names two of them, “visionary green” and “confident orange,” as the ones that stand out. Vivint says these colours serve a functional purpose as well as a visual one. The palette on this page is our own interpretation: an evergreen, a deep pine and an ember orange on a pale mist.

The timing is part of the story. The May 2025 identity arrived about two years after NRG completed its purchase, and the release ties the new look to a broader brand that covers energy management as well as security. The name has stayed constant since 2011; it is the system around the name — icon, colour and tone — that has been redrawn to fit a larger owner and a wider promise.

For a design guide, Vivint shows how a company can rename itself around an idea, keep that name through changes of owner, and then redraw everything around it so that a security installer reads as a home brand. Compare ADT, the long-established alarm company it competes with, and SimpliSafe, a do-it-yourself security brand built on a very different sales model. For this guide we use evergreen, deep pine and ember orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Vivint’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.