Jiobit
Deal: $3 million
Investors: Lior Ron (founder of self-driving truck startup Otto that sold to Uber), MATH Venture Partners, Sandalphon Capital, Bridge Investments, Harvard Business School Angels, Wakestream Ventures, Graphene Ventures, Projector Ventures, Nameless Ventures and Inflection Equity.
What they do: Jiobit makes wearable tracking devices that attach to a kid's clothing to help parents know where their children are at all times. It uses a combination of GPS and beacon technology to track the location of a child. The device can track a child both indoors and outside, even determining what floor of a shopping mall a child is on, for example. The device, which is about the size of a quarter and available for pre-order later this year, attaches to a child's pants or shoes and boasts battery life up to 640 hours.
Communicating with the parent's smartphone, the device also uses machine learning algorithms to intelligently determine a child’s behavior, context and location to figure out their routines and alert parents when a child diverts from their normal pattern. If a child always goes to swim practice and Girl Scouts after school, but they instead go in a different direction, the parent gets an alert.
Other details: Jiobit was founded by former Motorola executive John Renaldi. The company was part of the most recent Techstars Chicago class, and it raised a $1.2 million seed round last June.
Eventually, Jiobit's goal is to make wearable trackers so small that they can fit into the fabric of a child's clothes, Renaldi says.
Image via Jiobit
