Tile has $13M and dreams of helping Android users find their keys,too
October 1, 2014 9:00 AM
Kia Kokalitcheva
Tile is the little tracker that gave every forgetful person hope that they
could find keys and wallets as easily as “Find my iPhone” turns up their
phones.
And after shipping more than 300,000 devices since it began in May (that’s
a lot of lost keys), the company is now announcing $13 million in funding
from a long list of investors.
Tile is the tiny tracker that links to a mobile app, and it’s seen a lot of
buzz ever since it was announced last summer. You can attach the tracker to
virtually anything, and thanks to Bluetooth low energy, you can track it
with your phone. It’s basically a more modern and arguably better version
of those beeping keychains you could once get to help you find lost keys
under the couch cushions.
“We’re basically ridding the world of lost items and doing that by selling
a low-cost solution,” Tile cofounder and chief executive Nick Evans told
me in an interview.
Now that the company has about $9.5 million in new funding — the other $3.5
million came from Tencent last October — it’s obviously going to use a
good portion of it to meet its inventory demand. Evans told me that since
launch, people have ordered more than 500,000 Tiles. And since 300,000 have
shipped, my math says that it still needs to send out about 200,000. Good
thing it has the new money. Tile is even hoping to eventually be able to do
next-day shipping by Black Friday in November.
But the other chunk of Tile’s new funding will go towards making Tile
available to Android users. First up, Tile will make its product compatible
with the Samsung Galaxy S5 and gradually roll it out to more Android devices.
“We’re dedicated to building a product that works every time you need it.
Part of that is making sure that the secondary device works exactly as
expected with Tile,” said Evans.
“It’s really tempting to say, ‘Ok, Android is all the same, so let’s do
all the devices at once,’” he said. But because Tile is not just an app
that communicates with something through the Internet — it uses Bluetooth
low-energy — the company wants to make sure it perfectly syncs with each
device’s hardware.
The Galaxy S5 is the most popular Android phone that has Bluetooth low-
energy, according to Evans, so that’s why it’s Tile’s first target.
Along with just wanting to enable as many people as possible have access to
Tile, the company wants to get to Android because the more users it has, the
stronger its network becomes. Part of how Tile works is by creating a
network of phones that can communicate with nearby devices. If a Tile isn’t
close enough to any enabled phone, it won’t appear in the network and its
owner won’t know where it is. So adding Android users into the network
means a denser network to help fish out Tile-equipped items.
The company is also already working on the second version of its gadget,
although Evans declined to tell me about the new features and
functionalities it will have. He did, however, stress that the larger and
denser Android user network would be key to these new features.
GGV Capital led the new round of capital, with additional participation from
Tandem Capital, Nick Woodman (GoPro), Rothenberg Ventures, Jerry Yang’s
AME Cloud Ventures (Yahoo), Dave Morin’s Slow Ventures (Path), Charles
Huang (Guitar Hero), Chris Hulls (Life360), Bob Lee (Square), and Mike and
Kass Lazerow (BuddyMedia) among others. The first $3.5 million raised in
October came from Tencent. GGV Capital’s Jeff Richards is also joining Tile
’s board of directors.
Tile was founded in 2012 by Nick Evans and Mike Farley and is based in San
Mateo, Calif. The company previously raised $2.68 million through its
crowdfunding campaign last summer.
