Life360 Buys Bluetooth Tracking Company Tile for $205 Million | Apple Find My Network Competitor

Urian B., Tech Times 23 November 2021, 06:11 pm

Life360, a company that focuses on services to allow families to keep tabs on each other's safety, is now buying a company that pioneered consumer trackers called Tile. The acquisition for the once crowdfunded campaign is currently worth $205 million.

Life360 Acquires Tile at $205 Million Valuation

According to the story by ArsTechnica, the acquisition now puts Tile at a $205 million valuation and is expected to be finalized in Q1 of 2022. C.J. Prober, the current CEO of Tile, will still remain at the helm, and Tile will also be retaining its own brand while expected to retain its own employees as well.

Prober is also expected to join Life360's board. The company already owns a widely used app that would allow family members to be able to track one another's locations, get notifications on accidents, and more.

Life360 Expansion with Tile

The merger with Tile will allow Life360's users to track items as well as pets. This is partly due to physical objects, like luggage or cats, being better tracked by certain individual pieces of hardware instead of a smartphone which users usually carry.

This sale will also bring access to new technology for Life360 from the Tile Finding Network. This works by users being able to leverage Tile's smartphone app on users' phones to help them locate nearby items that are missing for others.

27,000 Retail Stores with Over Millions of Tile Devices

Life360 currently has 33 million users as of the moment, which is expected to expand the reach of the current Tile Finding Network tenfold, as per the company's claims. Life360 will also be able to gain access to 27,000 retail stores where Tile products are already being sold and to over a million devices that already include Tile tech.

Tile initially crowdfunded the campaign, which was heralded to be a revolutionary product upon its first unveiling. Ever since then, it has been able to gain massive enthusiastic press coverage that is relative to the smaller user base size.

Apple AirTags vs. Tile Finding Network

As of early this year, Apple also introduced its AirTags, which is a product that works closely like the Tile trackers but with some other technologies, as well as the ability to leverage a network of over a billion iOS users. This makes the AirTags much bigger and thus much more effective compared to the Tile Finding Network.

The acquisition press release from Life360 goes into detail and notes that the new Life360/Tile network will be very platform agnostic. As of the moment, Apple's competing Find My network is still only available on iOS, which could give Tile an advantage. Apple, however, already has its own plans to bring some support to Android users in the coming future.

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Written by Urian B.