Have you ever lost a key and just made a copy of it? Or lost a keycard for your office and the manager just gives you a new one? Where’d the old one go? Who has it? Do they know what door it unlocks? Have you ever fired someone and they didn’t return their keys and you emailed them and never heard back? Have you ever just forgot your key at home felt like a moron?
Well, there’s a Brooklyn-based company that’s out to solve all these problems as well as several more, and they’re doing it, like everything else, with your phone. Kisi allows you to unlock doors with an app.
You just walk up to a door, slide your finger from “locked” to “unlocked” and walk right in. That door had been locked but now it isn’t.
How it works. (Courtesy image)
“Our founders worked in a cloud-based fitness machines company that grew from five employees to 50 in a year,” explained Kisi’s Alex Shamy. “Being two of the early employees, they found themselves with 50 coworkers and only five security keys. That didn’t exactly improve the security in the office, everyone was buzzed in manually without checking who was at the door.”
So they devised a software system that issues keys and access digitally, and keeps a log of each person’s entrance and exit from the building.
Interestingly, the company gets a good amount of its hardware manufactured via 3D printing.
“We develop all of our physical hardware in sprints, a method that is normally reserved for mobile development,” Shamy explained. “That’s why sometimes 3D printing is the only way to get a product to the market within our timeframe. Making a tool, ordering from Asia and waiting for shipment often takes six to eight weeks and that is way too long for today’s new technology.”
The company is growing and has been used by some big, familiar names already: Casper, Harry’s and Oscar are on the system, according to Kisi.
Big companies and startups are great, but we can’t wait until Kisi is used for homes as well, though it would’ve made it a bit harder in high school to tell mom and dad I “didn’t get home that late” when they could’ve just checked the key log.
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