Alohar Mobile
A location-based, ambient-sensing platform that enables developers to build customized mobile apps.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| N/A | €0.0 | round | |
| N/A | €0.0 | round | |
N/A | Seed | ||
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
Alohar Mobile, Inc. operated as a platform provider that enabled mobile applications to understand user behavior for delivering customized services.
The company was founded in 2010 by CEO Sam Liang, along with other entrepreneurs and alumni from Stanford and Google. Liang, a former Google engineer, was instrumental in developing the blue dot location finder for early iPhone interactions with Google Maps. This background in location-based services was foundational to Alohar's technology. The Palo Alto-based company secured $2 million in funding from investors including Tim Draper, David Cheriton, and Ken Xie. A significant milestone was its acquisition in December 2013 by AutoNavi, which subsequently became part of Alibaba's portfolio of companies. The acquisition amount was reported to be $30 million.
Alohar Mobile provided a developer platform with software development kits (SDKs) for both iOS and Android. The technology focused on what it called "persistent sensing," utilizing a phone's sensory data—such as motion detection and Wi-Fi signals—to continuously gather information on a user's habits and location with low power consumption. This allowed mobile applications to become more predictive and proactive. For example, an application could learn a user's preferences in the background and offer services before they were manually requested. The platform served developers creating apps across various sectors, including social networking, personal assistants, shopping, travel, and enterprise workforce management. Development partners who utilized the platform included Citymaps, MileIQ, and Wanderful Media. The business model included a free tier for developers to get started, with paid pricing for applications exceeding 100,000 monthly active users.
The core of Alohar's service was its context-aware platform, which allowed applications to automatically recognize a user's location, place, and time to provide a more personalized and relevant experience. The company also introduced a proprietary context-aware analytics platform, giving developers insights into a user's mobile life, such as where they shop, eat, and work. This data enabled the creation of smarter, more intuitive applications that could anticipate user needs.
Keywords: context-aware platform, mobile user behavior, location-based services, persistent sensing, mobile application development, SDK, user analytics, Android applications, iOS applications, Sam Liang, AutoNavi, Alibaba, smart personal assistant, mobile-local-commerce, user preference learning, predictive applications, contextual applications, developer platform, low power consumption, behavioral analytics