The Sacramento-based maker of the Safer Lock, a tamper-resistant line of locks and containers for prescription drugs, has changed its name and restructured its operations with a Bay Area technology veteran buying a controlling interest.
The company, formerly called Gatekeeper Innovation Inc., is now RxGuardian Inc.
"It's basically new ownership," said Nathan Langley, CEO and co-founder of the company. Langley took on the top executive role in January 2022, succeeding Kevin Kane, who had run the company for the previous two years.
RxGuardian is still based in Sacramento, but it's given up its warehouse space in North Natomas for an office in East Sacramento.
The company used to store, package and fulfill orders at its warehouse. It now outsources that work to Pride Industries. RxGuardian also now outsources its marketing work and its legal work, Langley said.
One of the private company's longtime investors has taken majority ownership, and with that change the company changed its name. The investor is Silicon Valley veteran CEO and investor David Brewer, whose investment was through his Brewer Nevada charitable trust. Brewer has been president of private equity firm Aragon Ventures Inc. for 24 years, and he has been CEO, president or founder of seven companies. Those include Inktomi Corp., a pioneer of Internet search technology in the dot-com boom, which was ultimately acquired by Yahoo Inc. for $235 million in 2003. Brewer didn't respond to a request for comment on RxGuardian.
Langley declined to disclose the value of the investment or Brewer Nevada's percentage ownership other than to say it is a majority.
The name change became effective in November, and the company has been changing its name officially on contracts with customers and clients and the U.S. Patent and Trademark office, Langley said.
Langley co-founded Gatekeeper Innovation in 2012 and developed the Safer Lock, a medicine bottle cap designed to prevent unauthorized access to prescription medication. The cap has a combination lock that the user sets, and the combination wheel has big dials, intended to make it so even users with arthritis can easily use it. Safer Lock is meant to allow only the person with the prescription — and the combination — to access the medication. That way, if the bottle is broken, the person with the prescription knows someone else is tampering with their pills.
The company was founded to battle the opioid addiction crisis.
RxGuardian's products are in every Walgreens in the country and 7,000 CVS locations.
The company has a patent on its basic lock, and in 2019, it received a patent for a future version of its Safer Lock cap for pill bottles, and the description includes sensors, LEDs and a microprocessor.
While the locking part of the original Safer Lock cap was developed to help secure highly abused pills such as opioids and painkillers, the remote monitoring aspect of the new cap has other applications, such as remote monitoring by a doctor or loved one. By making the cap intelligent, it can also prompt the user to take the medication with reminders like a light on the cap or a phone message.
Langley declined to disclose RxGuardian's revenue, but he said that it's grown steadily. In the fourth quarter of last year, revenue was 200% higher than the year-earlier period, he said.
Langley was an honoree in the Business Journal's 40 Under 40 awards in 2016.
