Life360, a popular family tracking app, is acquiring Jiobit, a Chicago-based provider of wearable location devices for young children, pets, and seniors, for $37 million. The deal could be worth up to $54.5 million if Jiobit hits certain performance metrics. The deal is expected to close in the coming months, Jiobit CEO John Renaldi said.
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Jiobit’s wearable devices would be incorporated into Life360’s family safety membership, which provides holistic protection for driving, physical, and digital safety. Premium Life360 members would get discounted access to Jiobit devices, and post-integration, family members and pets wearing Jiobit devices would appear on a single unified family map interface, reports BusinessWire.
“We’ve long wanted to expand beyond the smartphone into wearable devices, and Jiobit offers the market-leading device for pets, younger children, and seniors,” said Chris Hulls, CEO and co-founder of Life360. “With Jiobit, Life360 would be the market leader in both hardware and software products for families once the deal closes. We will continue to seek out additional opportunities that could further cement our position as the leading digital safety brand for families.”
“Life360, as the leading smartphone platform for families, is the natural home for Jiobit. We have the same shared long-term vision around the future of the digitally native family, and this rollup is a natural accelerator,” said John Renaldi, CEO and co-founder of Jiobit. “We’re excited to gain access to Life360’s large user base and have access to new resources that will let us ramp up our growth, new product development, and expansion into additional verticals.”
The final transaction is subject to the approval of the Board of Directors of both Life360 and Jio, Inc., as well as the stockholders of Jio, Inc. The Life360 app can be downloaded from the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Life360 operates a platform for today’s busy families, bringing them closer together by helping them better know, communicate with, and protect the people they care about most. The Company’s core offering, the Life360 mobile app, is a market-leading app for families, with features that range from communications to driving safety and location sharing. Life360 is based in San Francisco and had more than 26 million monthly active users (MAU) as at December 2020, located in 195 countries.
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Jiobit was founded in 2015 by Renaldi, a former Motorola executive who created the device after briefly losing track of his own child in Maggie Daley Park. The company’s primary 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.
