Ring’s former CEO is rebranding Latch to Door.com

Ring’s former CEO is rebranding Latch to Door.com

Image: Latch

Latch, the commercial access company run by the founder of Ring, is expanding beyond smart locks. The company announced today that it’s rebranding to Door.com with the goal of offering an overarching platform that gives independent service workers, like drivers, housekeepers, and dog walkers, a platform to grow their businesses.

After founding Ring in 2013, Jamie Siminoff sold the company to Amazon in 2018, where he continued to work until leaving in May of this year. The next day, Latch announced that it had acquired Siminoff’s four-month-old stealth startup, Honest Day’s Work, and Siminoff became CEO of Latch. Honest Day’s Work aimed to create “a full-building operating system designed to help owners, residents, and third parties like guests, couriers, and service providers seamlessly experience the modern building.”

Latch has become known for its line of smart locks that landlords can use to manage who can enter their buildings. It also developed its own smart building operating system, LatchOS, which offers control over its smart locks as well as other smart devices via the Latch app. The rebrand doesn’t mean that Latch is going away, however, as Siminoff seeks to combine its vision with that of Honest Day’s Work. According to Siminoff, Latch will exist as a subbrand under the Door.com umbrella, joining a series of other services that the company plans on launching in the future.

“I think Latch was too constrained on expanding that vision.”

“Latch is a great brand for locks, but I do think it was too constrained,” Siminoff tells The Verge. “Even if you go back to latch before I was part of it... they had this vision of services and other things. I think Latch was too constrained on expanding that vision.”

One of the services Door.com is launching in line with that goal is called James, something Siminoff says is the “first view you can get into what we were building.” This app serves as a platform for professional drivers, allowing them to book and manage clients. Siminoff notes that while drivers will get 100 percent of the profit, riders will get charged a 5 percent cut that James will take.

It’s still not clear what other services Door.com plans on launching in the future, but it seems the company will adjust its path based on the success of James. “I could see a world where you master that and then you launch multiple verticals from there... but we definitely want to learn more.” Door.com is expected to officially launch sometime next year.