The last time you had a key cut, you probably experienced a retro service, which included speaking to a real human (ugh!). KeyMe puts the kibosh on the old-fashioned key copying user experience with a series of new kiosks and just landed a $15 million Series C round to fund aggressive expansion.
“KeyMe is poised to help tens of millions of consumers securely and conveniently copy keys at their local retailer,” Greg Marsh, founder and CEO of KeyMe told me, explaining that the company is eager to disrupt what it claims is a $7.5 billion per year industry. “This new round of funding will help us meet explosive retailer demand for tens of thousands of new kiosks.”
The Series C was led by QuestMark Partners. It’s a smaller round than the company’s previous $20 million Series B nine months ago, but it brings the total of funds raised to $45 million. The previous investors, including Comcast Ventures, Battery Ventures, White Star Capital, 7-Eleven, Ravin Gandhi and the Polsky Family Office also participated in the round.
The shiny new KeyMe kiosk supports the majority of automotive keys, and can even clone transponders, saving car owners a fat stack of dollars in the process. Fob-style smart keys can cost a huge amount of money, but KeyMe’s versions range from $20 to $60.
Another tech-enabled innovation is the ability to save digitized versions of keys to the KeyMe cloud. If a customer needs another copy, it can be printed without the original key being present.