With ‘Nucleus,’ Harvard Law grad wants to upgrade the intercom

Jonathan Frankel wanted to install an intercom in his Lower Merion home to be able to communicate with his three young sons.

The price tag? $3,500, according to one contractor, for the same intercom his parents used 20 years ago.

So Frankel, 29, decided to make a better, cheaper one. Nucleus uses WiFi, an HD camera and a touchscreen to let people communicate throughout a house. It’ll also work as a baby monitor. Nucleus isn’t taking orders yet but soon plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign to bring the prototype to market. The device should sell for less than $200, Frankel said.

Nucleus founder Jonathan Frankel. (Photo courtesy of Jonathan Frankel)

Frankel, a Harvard Law grad who used to work as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group, did a consumer test by making a Google ad for a similar product. It got him $4,000 in pre-orders, he wrote on Medium.

There aren’t any products that do what Nucleus aims to do, Frankel said on ProductHunt, though “there are plenty of one-way Internet-connected video monitors (Dropcam, Piper, Canary, etc.).”

So far, Frankel is the only one who’s been working on the company full-time (he has also worked with some outsourced software developers). Frankel says he’s soon bringing on a senior software engineer who previously worked at a large videoconferencing company.