A San Francisco family tracking app is planting its flag in Chicago after acquiring local hardware startup Jiobit.
Life360, a location sharing app for families, announced it has completed its acquisition of Jiobit, which was first announced in April. The deal is worth up to $54.5 million and allows Life360 to expand beyond smartphone apps and into wearable devices.
As part of the acquisition, Life360 announced Wednesday that it's launching a development center as it expands the Jiobit brand. Chicago will serve as a new hardware and software innovation hub for the company, with plans to more than double the size of the Jiobit team to at least 60 employees in the coming months.
The company also named new executive hires for Jiobit today, including Alex Behrens, who is joining as CTO. Behrens previously led engineering and data teams at Signal, Showpad and BuiltIn. It also hired Brian Breunig, a former engineering leader at Motorola Mobility, as VP of hardware engineering; Martina Matthews, part of the founding team at Chegg.com, as VP of customer experience; and Tyler Qahhaar, who held recruiting roles at Cameo, Uptake, and Gogo, as its head of people and culture.
"With the acquisition of Jiobit, Chicago now joins San Diego and San Francisco as one of our main development clusters where we will offer a hybrid work environment to our employees," Life360 CEO Chris Hulls said in a statement.
Jiobit was founded in 2015 by former Motorola executives John Renaldi and Roger Ady. It raised $12 million in venture funding from investors like MATH Venture Partners, NETGEAR, Sandalphon Capital and Techstars. Its main product is a tracking device that attaches to a child's clothes and sends alerts to a parent's smartphone when they've left their side. It uses a combination of GPS and beacon technology to track where the child is, and it can also measure heights — like if the child is on the top of a slide or on the third floor of a shopping mall.
In 2017, Jiobit launched a similar version for pets and also makes a version for seniors.
Life360, which is publicly traded on the Australian Securities Exchange, has more than 150 total employees.
