AILA
Founders: Jason Gulbinas & Matt Kowalczyk
Headquarters: Natick, MA
Year Founded: 2010
Year Romulus Invested: 2015
Aila is redefining retail with its suite of iOS-based handheld and kiosk scanning devices, which move customer service employees away from desks to meet customers where they are: in the aisles. Aila’s solutions for iPhone, iPad, and iPod provide the most advanced image-based scanning platform on the market, delivering high-performance barcoding today and flexibility for the future.
The company blends form and function with its sleek, slim products that enable customers to engage directly and seamlessly with retailers, improving the experience for customer and company alike. Aila’s simple yet powerful devices are designed with the 21st-century shopper in mind, enabling forward-thinking retailers to deploy engaging experiences for their customers while digitizing their workflows.
The Aila-Romulus story:
Aila, formerly called Padloc, originally built iPad enclosures. When Krishna visited hardware-focused VC Bolt’s office one day and heard about the company, he wondered if it had something more up its proverbial sleeve. Krishna was familiar with the retail hardware space due to his investment in E la Carte [LINK], and he wondered if Aila could fill a similar niche. “Sure enough, it turns out the company had actually developed a way to use the iPad’s native camera to scan better than massive incumbents could with their proprietary scanning engines,” Krishna says. Since that first hunch, we have worked closely with the company, growing our partnership as it has provided innovative product solutions to one billion-dollar group after the other.
Romulus value in action: Engineering. Aila’s team has built its business carefully, from its genesis as a simple enclosures company to one that hacked better scanning technologies and integrated them into sleek and intuitive iOS-based products that both enterprises and their end customers prefer. This approach has enabled Aila to perform better than much larger, more established companies.