In today’s society most people keep better track of their cellphones than their house keys, inspiring two Lebanese entrepreneurs to find a new age solution to an age-old problem. Charly Bousaid and Hady Abdelnour came up with the idea of a Bluetooth enabled lock, Smarke, that could be accessed from your smartphone, making it much harder to lose than a set of house keys.
“Basically, my best friend and [business] partner, he kept losing his keys. Literally. I mean every day he kept losing his keys and it’s either he needs to duplicate keys from his mom or brothers, or they need to change the whole lock. ... And suddenly he told me, I keep losing my keys let’s do something about it,” said Bousaid, Smarke co-founder and director of operations.
The pair began developing a product and company last August. Smarke works by replacing the old lock’s cylinder with a new smart-cylinder that will pair wirelessly to a smartphone app. The owner is notified when the door is opened, can send the key to other users, and revoke key access at any time. It only takes a minute to install and is as secure as the old lock, if not more, Bousaid insists.
“We’re using military-used algorithms. So we’re not creating libraries here, we’re using them. And banks are using the same algorithms; we’re not really changing anything,” Bousaid said.
Early this year, Bousaid and Abdelnour took advantage of the free office space offered to digital startups by the U.K. Lebanon Tech Hub. Months later Smarke entered the tech hub’s accelerator program, gaining three months of mentorship to help develop and polish the startup in hopes of expanding into an international business.
“[Smarke] has the potential to grow fast and large, so they need the infrastructure to be able to grow with them,” said Caroline Issac Hamden, lead mentor for the U.K. Lebanon Tech Hub accelerator.
With the tech hub, startups can use free office space with access to the internet, phone services and air conditioning for free without being a part of the accelerator. The co-working space created an atmosphere that helped Smarke grow before the mentorship even began.
“Other than the renting, the payments, being here made it a lot easier growing because they help you in everything. You can even socialize with other startups, you can learn from them, they can learn from you. The U.K. Lebanon Tech Hub [is] fantastic to be honest,” Bousaid said.
Hamden’s work with Smarke has focused on cultivating the business skills and professionalism to appeal to Western investors and partners. The biggest accomplishment Hamden references is the ability to create clearly defined roles between the partners, establishing who takes the lead on which responsibilities. The pair complement each other, between Bousaid’s software-engineering skills and Abdelnour’s background in the finance industry.
“When I first met them ... the huge thing that screamed out to me was potential,” Hamden said.
Potential is also what made Smarke stand out at MIT’s Grow My Business competition, winning a prize of LL50 million ($33,000) against 15 other competitors. Judges based their decision on a product’s innovation, credibility, scalability, market size and the ability of the team to execute the plan.
“Smarke themselves, the way they pitched, [the panelists] were sure the product would grow,” said Yara Chalhoub, project manager at Grow My Business.
Lebanon is a base and a test market for Smarke, which plans to target the large network of Airbnb hosts in Europe.
He and his friends have spent a lot of timing using the service abroad, and saw that the solution created for an absent mind has a larger use for rental hosts. Hosts have to wait for renters to give out keys, and often those keys can be lost or duplicated – posing their own security concerns.
“Using Smarke facilitates the key exchange. Just give them the key using the phone and you revoke the key when you’re done. You can give the key and take it back. You can schedule access. ... That’s it and then you revoke it,” Bousaid said.
Once access is revoked, the key disappears from the app. The Bluetooth key is difficult to hack, but even if it is compromised, Smarke can be linked to WiFi to send a notification that the door has been opened. Although there are some competitive products such as Kevo in the US, Smarke is designed specifically for European-style locks.
“The next phase [is] completing the functioning prototype and the design for the manufacturing phase,” Bousaid said.
Abdelnour and Bousaid hope to launch Smarke early next year.
By Doha Madani
