Arnhem based startup TicTag raises €300.000 in a seed-round from a group of informal investors, HighTechXL and Greven Investments. The informal investors include Kees van der Geer, Aart Jan Schouten and Martijn de Vrij. The capital raised will be used to further the development of the Smart Tag, currently a unique stamp that activities a unique action when pushed on a smartphone screen. A part of the capital raised will used for marketing and sales.
TicTag is developing a new technology to create a connection between the offline world and smartphones. Founded in 2015 by Pieter Heersink TicTag believes it can help people to go about their daily activities without the hassle of taking their wallets with them, keys and loyalty cards. The TicTag is currently in a some ways a pimped old fashioned stamp that activates or logs a certain action in an app when pressed on the screen of a smartphone app. The tag mimics 5 fingers that together form a unique pattern. A product or location can be identified on the basis of this pattern.
The startup claims that the user experience of TicTag is more akin to how people are used to use products – like pushing a button – than a QR code, which has the added disadvantage that it can be copied. Heersink also thinks that TicTag is the most promising technology even compared to NFC. The argument is that NFC is not supported by Apple, because of which a platform agnostic and universally applicable technology to bring the online and offline world together is still missing.
The business model of the the company is based on providing clients such as retailers advanced customer data analytics. Heersink, however, stresses strongly that the customer stays in control concerning his data. This is because the customer consciously decides to ‘stamp’ the tag on the smartphone.
Currently the TicTag is approximately the size of the familiar tile tracker. The ultimatle goal of Heersink is to develop a razor-thin foil tag, the Smart Tag, that can be incorporated in for instance packing and can enable payments. The printing of the Smart Tags is done in cooperation with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the research institute InnovationLab in Heidelberg, Germany. The first Smart Tags will be ready at the start of 2018. “But when that is going to be achieved depends for a certain part on when the second investments is done”, Heersink states in a linkedin-post about the investment that
Photo by Hannes Wolf on Unsplash
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