Jiobit, the Chicago-based wearables startup that helps parents keep track of their children, announced on Thursday that it has raised $3 million in seed funding.
Chief Marketing Officer Lindsay Slutzky said the company is currently hiring for a visual designer and a mobile development lead in Chicago.
"Months of research and testing showed the size of the problem,” said founder John Renaldi in a statement. “More than half of parents have lost track of a child. With 18 million kids in our market, there’s huge opportunity to help.”
A former Motorola director, Renaldi founded Jiobit in 2015. The company came out of stealth last summer after being accepted into the Techstars Chicago accelerator program.
Slutzky said the company currently has 12 employees in Chicago, eight of whom work in its engineering department.
"We don't outsource anything," said Slutzky. "All of our engineering is in-house."
Jiobit has been hard at work refining its product ever since. The wearable boasts up to two months of battery life. The company is also working on machine learning technology that will get to know a child’s routines and notify parents if anything out of the ordinary is going on.
The chip is also tamper proof, and it uses a similar encryption technology to that used by chip-based credit card transactions.
Slutzky said these features have been in the works since Jiobit's founding, but that the company had held off on announcing them until now.
In 2016, Renaldi told Built In Chicago that he started working on Jibit after he and his wife lost track of their then seven-year-old son in Maggie Daley Park for half an hour before finding him safe and sound. The solution he came up with was a wearable that is as small as possible and attaches easily to a child’s clothing.
Jiobit’s investors include MATH Venture Partners, Inflection Equity and Lior Ron among others. The company said the new funding will help it bring the Jiobit tracker to market this year.
Slutzky said the company is also looking for two Chicago-based engineering interns for the summer of 2017.
Image via Jiobit.
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