Hi {{first_name | investor}},

Happy New Year,

As an investor in RYSE, I encourage you to take a few uninterrupted minutes to read this update.

With 2026 now underway, I want to share where we’re headed next and how 2025 set the foundation for it.

This past year wasn’t just about growth. It was about getting RYSE ready for where the industry is heading. We made decisions that strengthened the business, expanded our product lineup, and put us in a strong position for what comes next.

Our goal has always been simple: grow the company, increase its value, and build RYSE toward a potential exit. Everything we do is focused on creating the best possible outcome for the business and our shareholders, whether that ultimately takes the form of an IPO or an acquisition.

Now, let’s take a full look back at the year — and a look ahead at what’s coming in 2026.

2025 was a breakout year for the business.

While we haven’t closed our books for 2025 yet, we’re projecting net revenue to grow 50% year-over-year despite soft consumer sentiment and broader economic uncertainty. Consumer confidence remained weak through much of the year as inflation, tariffs, and economic worries weighed on households and spending plans, with sentiment indexes trending well below prior-year levels across 2025.¹ Despite these headwinds, demand for our products remained strong, and 2025 marked two major milestones for RYSE: surpassing $15 million in lifetime revenue and shipping over 75,000 devices to customers — something we’re incredibly proud of.

We achieved this growth while managing rising costs and an extra tariff burden on Chinese imports — which increased about 10% compared to 2024 (from roughly 25% to 35%). We’ve worked closely with our manufacturing partner to absorb much of this cost without compromising pricing or quality. We also built in flexibility with a backup factory in the Philippines that we can activate if tariffs shift further or supply risk increases.

Many third-party retail deals in our pipeline were paused this year as large retailers (i.e. Home Depot) prioritized diversifying their own supply chains outside of China, and deferred onboarding new brands. We’re expecting to re-engage with retailers for 2026.

A.I moved from hype to real-world use this year, and the smart home sits right at the center of that shift. How people interact with their homes is changing fast. Screens and apps still matter, but voice is becoming the primary interface. Like JARVIS in Iron Man — and the future many of us saw growing up in The Jetsons — people expect to speak naturally and have their homes respond.

Tesla is also signaling where the smart home is headed. Elon Musk has been clear about Tesla’s focus on AI, robotics, and automation beyond vehicles. Between Optimus, Tesla Energy, solar, storage, and AI-driven systems, the idea of a Tesla-powered smart home is becoming realistic. The home is starting to look less like a set of devices and more like a connected, intelligent system.

Apple is moving aggressively in the same direction. They’re investing deeper into the smart home and opening factories in Vietnam dedicated solely to manufacturing their smart home lineup. Reports of products like a Face ID–enabled door lock and a robotic home hub point to a future where Siri becomes the control layer for the Apple ecosystem.

Amazon is doing the same with Alexa. Voice assistants are becoming the operating systems of the home, coordinating lighting, climate, security, and automation across devices. As these ecosystems mature, consumers will expect their homes to respond automatically and intelligently, powered by A.I.

When companies like Tesla, Apple, and Amazon commit at this level, adoption accelerates, trust increases, and the value of companies like RYSE building core home automation technology grows.

The future many of us imagined growing up is no longer science fiction. We believe smart shading plays a key role in that future — improving comfort, reducing energy use, and helping homes run on their own.

A.I played a role across the company this year, but not in the way most people usually think about it.

Yes, we used A.I to move faster internally — scaling creative production, testing content, and automating parts of our marketing workflows. That helped us operate more efficiently with a lean team.

The more important shift is how A.I is shaping the future of our products.

We’re building an A.I automation platform for both homes and commercial buildings. In homes, this will live inside our mobile app and use a combination of a photo taken outside the window, the home’s location, device sensor data, and third-party weather data to decide how and when shades should move automatically.

In commercial buildings, the same platform focuses on reducing energy use and improving indoor comfort by responding to sunlight, heat, and occupancy throughout the day.

Smart shading isn’t just about convenience. By managing solar heat and making better use of natural daylight, our systems can reduce energy use by up to 24%.

The future RYSE is building toward is one where shades move automatically based on sunlight, temperature, and time of day — not because someone tapped a button, but because the system knows what to do.

This is a major focus for us heading into 2026. As we continue building toward this vision, we plan to raise a larger public round before shifting our focus toward institutional capital and, eventually, any IPO or exit considerations. For many shareholders, this may be the last opportunity to participate at this stage as a public investor, as we enter the next phase of the company. Learn more here.

One of the biggest product milestones of the year was SmartLyft.

Cordless blinds — the type you push up to open and pull down to close — now account for roughly 70–80% of all manual window blinds sold in 2025, driven by safety regulations that ban most free-hanging cords in residential homes. These regulations were introduced to reduce child and pet strangulation risks, and they’ve fundamentally changed how blinds are designed and sold. As a result, cordless has become the default choice for new homes and renovations.

Despite representing the vast majority of the market, cordless blinds have remained completely manual. Until now, there has been no practical way to automate them.

SmartLyft changes that.

It’s the first device designed specifically to motorize cordless blinds by mechanically lifting and lowering the blind while preserving its original operation. Solving this required rethinking automation from the ground up, both mechanically and electronically.

This product doesn’t just expand our lineup. It opens access to the largest and fastest-growing segment of the window coverings market — a category that was previously impossible to automate.

Take a look at the announcement for the development of the RYSE SmartLyft for cordless blinds below.

2025 marked a major milestone for SmartCurtain. This was the year we officially began shipping the product to customers, bringing automated curtain control into real homes, hotels, and commercial spaces.

As we rolled it out, one thing became clear very quickly: many high-end residential buildings, hotels, and offices don’t use standard curtain rods. They use track-based systems, often referred to as U-Rails. Without support for these systems, a large part of the market remained out of reach.

So we built a dedicated SmartCurtain U-Rail adapter.

This simple but critical accessory allows SmartCurtain to work with track systems commonly found across these environments, opening the door to larger installations and new markets where curtain automation demand is high.

As we begin expanding into hospitality and commercial projects, warm introductions go a long way — as a shareholder, if you have contacts at hotels or hospitality groups that could be a good fit for SmartCurtain, we’d love to connect.

That same focus on design and execution didn’t go unnoticed. In 2025, SmartCurtain received multiple international design awards:

Protecting our intellectual property has always been a priority at RYSE.

We’ve built a strong patent portfolio, and had previously secured a major win through Amazon’s patent enforcement program — now rebranded as Amazon APEX. This gives us the ability to remove infringing products from Amazon quickly when they violate our patents.

For a while, that’s exactly what we did.

Our enforcement efforts revealed a clear pattern. The same knockoff products kept appearing. Same designs. Same internals. Often coming from the same factories. It became a constant game of whack-a-mole — remove one copycat product listing, another would show up shortly after.

That’s when we made a strategic decision.

Instead of only playing defense, we decided to turn the situation into an opportunity. In other words, we decided to knock off the knock-offs.

That decision led to the launch of Aura.

Aura is our sister brand, designed as an entry-level OEM smart home line priced under $99. If RYSE is Lexus — premium, high-performance, built for larger and heavier shades — Aura is Toyota. Same category. Same core DNA. Different positioning.

Aura is built for smaller windows, with 2-months of battery life, and simpler use cases, while RYSE remains the premium standard. Because of its price point, distribution strategy, and addressable market, we believe Aura has the potential to generate revenue at a scale that could eventually rival — or even outpace — RYSE itself.

The brand is backed by our IP strategy, supported by Amazon APEX, and designed to scale through Amazon- and TikTok-first distribution with minimal marketing overhead.

This approach allows us to capture more of the market while protecting and strengthening the RYSE brand.

Everything we built in 2025 sets the stage for what comes next.

Looking ahead to 2026, A.I will be our primary focus. We believe intelligent automation — not just connected devices — is where the real long-term value will be created in the smart home and smart building categories. That belief is driving both our product roadmap and our capital strategy.

We’re planning to raise a larger public round to fund this opportunity and to meaningfully invest in building an A.I automation platform that serves both residential homes and commercial buildings.

Our view is simple: A.I is not a feature — it’s the foundation. A platform that can intelligently manage sunlight, heat, and energy usage across homes and buildings is critical to the next phase of RYSE’s growth and potential liquidity opportunities for investors, whether that’s through an IPO or acquisition. This investment round will play a central role in how we scale the business and strengthen our position moving forward.

As part of this process, I’m excited to introduce Raffi King ([email protected]), who is joining RYSE as our Investor Relations Associate. Raffi will be supporting this upcoming round and will be the primary point of contact for any investment-related questions. You’ll be hearing from him directly in the coming weeks as we begin sharing more details.

Raffi brings over 30 years of experience in private equity and has helped guide two companies through the process of going public, most recently in early 2025. Following that IPO, the CEO introduced Raffi to RYSE, and through several conversations it became clear that his experience closely aligned with where we’re headed. His background will be instrumental as we continue to grow the company and work toward creating liquidity opportunities for our shareholders, whether through an IPO or an acquisition.

We’ll also be hosting a live webinar in the coming weeks, where I’ll walk through what we’re building for 2026, how our A.I and energy strategy is evolving, and what this next phase looks like in more detail. Registration details will be shared soon.

Before closing, I also want to invite you to join our private RYSE Shareholders Facebook Group. This group is exclusive to shareholders and is where we share weekly updates, early thoughts, and decisions we’re actively weighing as a company. It’s also a space where shareholders can provide feedback and engage directly with the team as we continue building RYSE together. If you’re not already inside, we’d love to have you join. Click here to join.

If you’ve been following RYSE closely, 2026 will be an important year.

Thank you for being part of the journey and for continuing to build alongside us.

More very soon,