Life360, a provider of location information sharing services for children and families, announced the acquisition of Tracker Tile. The acquisition is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2022 with a value of $205 million. Even after the acquisition, Tile continues to serve as its own brand, and CJ Prober, the CEO of Tile, will participate in the Life360 Board of Directors.
There is also the impression that this acquisition is unexpected as it has been said that Tile’s profits are increasing despite unfair competition with Apple’s AirTag. However, Life360 founder and CEO Chris Hulls is an early-stage tile investor and has been talked about several times before. It is said that he had been hoping for the acquisition of Tile 10 years ago.
Life360 is a GPS-based service that mainly uses a smartphone to obtain location information. On the other hand, Tile is a tracking service using physical tags, which is a similar service, but has a slightly different scope, and combining the two makes it easier to discover people, objects, and pets. In addition, as 33 million Life360 users are added to the tile, the range where tile users can find other tiles (Finding Network) will increase tenfold.
Of course, there are advantages to the Life360 side. Although it is currently developing a global service, revenue outside the US is only 11%. With tiles that have already grown globally, Life360 itself can accelerate its global expansion. In addition, the acquisition of Tile is expected to increase Life360 subscriptions by 45% to 1.6 million.
It is said that the tile service itself will continue unchanged and there will be no major changes for the time being. However, it is expected that the two service subscription models will be integrated in the future to become a comprehensive service that can identify not only tile tags but also family location information in real time. Related information can be found here.