Greg Marsh, CEO of KeyMe, wants his company to become the most trusted name in locksmithing. The key duplication service, which offers a convenient alternative to calling up a guy with a drill in the middle of the night, now has 3,000 locations in 72 different retailers, such as IKEA, Rite Aid and Bed Bath & Beyond.
In large part, that growth has been fueled by a steady flow of venture capital from top-tier investors such as BlackRock, Comcast Ventures, and Questmark Partners.
This week Brentwood Associates joined the pack, leading a $35 million round of funding that will help KeyMe triple its footprint to 10,000 locations — though that’s only part of the startup’s plans.
“Our big goal is really to build the first-ever brand in the $12 billion locksmith industry,” Marsh told Cheddar.
KeyMe’s kiosks are self-service machines that allow customers to quickly fabricate keys that they’ve already uploaded and stored in a database using their phones. While technology watchers have raised security concerns about the process, Marsh says it offers a better alternative to the “massively fraudulent” and often unreliable locksmith industry.
Indeed, it was a shady, late-night encounter with a locksmith in New York City during his time in business school that gave Marsh the idea for the company.
Marsh also noted that KeyMe isn’t just in the kiosk business. It also wants to create a network of “highly-vetted” locksmiths who are available to customers on an on-call basis.
“Sales from the kiosk are the majority, but we have close to 100,000 customers per month who are coming to KeyMe for some kind of locksmith service,” Marsh said. “A majority of those, about 75 percent, are in some kind of urgent lockout situation.”
KeyMe is also increasingly offering assistance outside of home lockouts, including duplication services for RFID (radio-frequency identification) and vehicle transponder keys.
“We started the company making brass keys, and that still remains a core part of the business, but we’re getting more sophisticated in the types of keys that we can make,” Marsh said.
With competitors such as MinuteKey and My Key Machine vying for similar territory, Marsh says KeyMe differentiates itself through its suite of services and focus on customer experience.
“We’ve been very fortunate to be the leader in this space. We’ve displaced our competitors out of a variety of retailers,” he said.
“Leveraging incredibly sophisticated technology and delivering a highly-differentiated, convenient and satisfying consumer experience, KeyMe is nonpareil in the locksmith industry,” said Eric Reiter, partner at Brentwood Associates, in a news release.
Joe Cecela, Dream Exchange CEO, explains how they are aiming to form the first minority-controlled company to operate an exchange in U.S. history. Watch!
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
