Lockitron

Overview

Lockitron is remembered for two things: a crowdfunding triumph and a fulfillment disaster. After Kickstarter rejected its phone-controlled door lock as a "home improvement" product rather than a creative project, founders Cameron Robertson and Paul Gerhardt built their own pre-order site and, in October 2012, raised roughly $2.3 million from about 15,000 backers in a month.^[1][2]

Then it couldn't ship. The retrofit Lockitron was plagued by battery drain and Wi-Fi reliability problems, deliveries slipped for years, and the company eventually asked backers to migrate to a cheaper replacement lock, the Bolt.^[6] By the time execution stabilized, better-funded rivals and platform players had defined the smart-lock category. Lockitron's parent, Apigy, was acquired by the Chamberlain Group in January 2019, folded into the myQ platform, and the standalone service was shut down in June 2020.^[8]

Founding Story

Lockitron came out of Apigy, a company Cameron Robertson and Paul Gerhardt took through Y Combinator's Summer 2009 batch.^[4] The idea was straightforward: let people unlock their doors with a phone. The founders' defining moment was not the product launch but the reaction to rejection. When Kickstarter turned them down on the grounds that a door lock wasn't a "creative project," they refused to wait and built their own crowdfunding page instead.^[1]

The result made them briefly famous. The self-hosted campaign hit its $150,000 goal within 24 hours and closed near $2.3 million, proving a startup could crowdfund entirely outside the big platforms.^[3] The founders then open-sourced the code as Selfstarter, and it went on to power other campaigns including Tile — a genuine contribution to the crowdfunding ecosystem that outlived the product itself.^[1] That very success planted the seed of failure: $2.3 million in pre-orders committed a small team to mass-manufacturing a hard piece of connected hardware it had not yet proven it could build.

Timeline

• 2009: Founders take Apigy through Y Combinator (Summer 2009).^[4]
• Oct 2012: After Kickstarter's rejection, a self-hosted campaign raises ~$2.3M from ~15,000 backers.^[2]
• 2012–2014: Selfstarter open-sourced; retrofit Lockitron suffers long delays over battery and Wi-Fi issues.^[5]
• 2015: Pivots to the Lockitron Bolt, a full replacement deadbolt marketed as the first smart lock under $100.^[5]
• Jan 2019: Apigy/Lockitron acquired by the Chamberlain Group.^[7]
• Jun 2020: Standalone Lockitron service shut down; Bolt migrated toward myQ.^[6]

What They Built

The original 2012 Lockitron was a retrofit device: a battery-powered unit that clamped over the inside thumb-turn of an existing deadbolt and twisted it via a motor, so renters and homeowners could install it without replacing the lock or calling a locksmith. It connected over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, letting owners lock and unlock from a phone, share access, and receive entry notifications.^[5]

The design's convenience was also its curse. Keeping a small battery-powered device on Wi-Fi for instant remote access drained batteries quickly and produced unreliable connectivity, and the motorized retrofit had to work across many slightly different deadbolts.^[6] After years of struggling with this, Lockitron changed the product itself. The 2015 Bolt abandoned the retrofit approach and became a complete replacement deadbolt, using Bluetooth by default with a separate plug-in Bridge for remote Wi-Fi access — cheaper to build, more reliable, but a different and later product than the one 15,000 people had pre-ordered.^[5]

Market Position

Target Customers

Lockitron targeted consumers and renters who wanted keyless entry and remote access — a broad audience, but one buying a discretionary upgrade to a device (the lock) that already worked.

Market Size

The connected-lock market was real and growing, but it was a subset of the larger smart-home market and heavily contested by established lock manufacturers with retail shelf space and installer relationships Lockitron did not have.