Samsung has bought SmartThings, the startup that makes smart-home controllers. While the companies did not disclose the price, sources said the South Korean consumer electronics giant paid about $200 million.

SmartThings will continue to be run by CEO and founder Alex Hawkinson and operate independently, Samsung said. But most of its operations — which now include 55 employees in Washington, D.C., and also offices in San Francisco and Minnesota — will be moved to Palo Alto, Calif., to become part of Samsung’s Open Innovation Center (OIC) there.

That unit, which is run by former Google and AOL exec David Eun, is focused on software and services innovation. As an example, the accelerator recently helped launch an app called Terrain, which “offers users a list of cards that provide shortcuts to information, content, social network feeds, frequently accessed information and settings on the device.”

In an interview earlier today, Hawkinson said that the sale to Samsung would help accelerate its efforts. “I think at a high level, it has always been our vision to go really big,” he said, pointing out Samsung’s massive global footprint and range of consumer appliances, as well as access to retail channels. “It’s just scale and reach all around the world — imagine reaching hundreds of millions of consumers and many more developers.”

Like Oculus VR, which recently sold to Facebook for $2 billion, SmartThings — which is actually owned by a company called Physical Graph Corp. — started as a Kickstarter project in 2012. It has since raised just over $15 million in funding, with investors that include Greylock Partners, Highland Capital and First Round Capital, among others.

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