After selling nearly 35,000 units of its ingenious bicycle GPS, the small Montreal company SmartHalo is closing its doors.
Xavier Peich, co-founder and CEO of the startup who made his mark in 2015 by raising $ 500,000 on Kickstarter, confirmed at Journal of Montreal that the offices were now empty and the servers disabled. SmartHalo devices in circulation are no longer functional. On the company’s Facebook page, many customers testified that they received an email announcing the shutdown. Several – their total number is estimated at 6,000 – still had not received their SmartHalo 2 sold as of 2019 and were enraged not to be reimbursed for these devices sold for $ 134 each.
“SmartHalo is dead,” writes for example one of these angry customers. The only way to do anything is through social media and file a complaint at any police station. ”
It was not possible to speak to CEO and co-founder of SmartHalo, Xavier Peich, who did not respond to emails and calls from Press.
At Journal of Montreal, he said he was “in the process of making a procedure to see if we manage to sell assets”, so that another company can resume activities. He attributed the closure of his company to the inability to produce the 16,000 units of the Smart Halo 2 ordered in Asia, due to COVID.
The SmartHalo is a rechargeable hockey puck-sized device with a multi-colored LED display. Connected to a smart phone, it can indicate directions and also serves as an anti-theft device and odometer. The SmartHalo 2, offered from 2019, has a more sophisticated OLED screen that also displays the temperature, the name of the streets or the name of the caller. This last version was chosen by the magazine Time in 2019 among his 100 best inventions of the year.