Anthony
Chow

The man who turned a lost key into a lock business

Ask Anthony Chow why he does this and he answers with a question of his own: what is the first thing you touch when you get home, and the last thing you touch when you leave? The key. He looked at that small brass object, the one everyone carries and no one thinks about, and decided it was a problem worth a decade.

Today he runs igloo, the Singapore company behind igloohome - smart locks and keyboxes that open by Bluetooth and time-sensitive PIN codes, no Wi-Fi required. The number that matters is not the funding or the headcount. It is the 20 million-plus digital credentials the company has handed out: 20 million moments where someone got into a home, a rental, a storeroom or a utility cabinet without a physical key changing hands.

igloo's locks now manage hundreds of thousands of doors across dozens of countries, with thousands of enterprise clients and an official Airbnb partnership that auto-generates check-in codes. Chow is the data scientist who chose, against most sensible advice, to make hardware - the slowest, most unforgiving kind of startup there is.

It started with a guest at the wrong hour

Before igloo, Chow led data science teams at Singtel's Group Digital Life unit, building personalization engines - the kind of work where the product is a model, not a thing you can drop on your foot. On the side, he and his co-founders hosted on Airbnb. The recurring headache was always the same: handing over keys. Guests landed at odd hours. Keys got lost. Someone had to be physically present to let people in.

That friction became the company. Chow, Kelvin Ho and Walter Wang founded igloohome in 2015 with a slogan that has not changed since: create a world without keys. The early days were lean in a way that sounds invented. They rented an Airbnb and sublet the spare rooms to fund the work and field-test their own locks on real guests. The first lock install took roughly twelve hours, because none of them had done it before.

The technical bet was contrarian. While rivals leaned on Wi-Fi and the cloud, igloo built locks that work offline, using proprietary algoPIN technology to generate one-time PIN codes that the lock can verify on its own. No internet meant no router to crash, no network for an attacker to lean on, and no app for a guest to download. The stubbornness about offline access is, in many ways, the whole business.

Move fast, break things - then learn that hardware breaks back

Chow came from software, where the mantra is to move fast and break things. Hardware does not play along. Manufacturing turned out slower and more expensive than expected, with product cycles measured in seasons rather than sprints. The team set up a production operation in China to get the manufacturing right and protect cash flow.

An early product failure taught the lesson that stuck: when a lock disappoints, trust evaporates fast, because the customer is literally locked out of their own life. Chow's answer was to overinvest in customer support rather than treat it as a cost line. A lock is a promise, and the promise has to hold at 2 a.m.

The US launch in 2021 landed in the middle of the pandemic. The team worked out of an Airbnb living room in an unfamiliar country and made long cross-country drives to deliver product and keep costs down. The US would go on to become roughly half of revenue.

From a spare room to outer space

• PRE-2015Leads data science teams building personalization engines at Singtel's Group Digital Life.
• 2015Co-founds igloohome with Kelvin Ho and Walter Wang to kill the key exchange.
• 2016Takes the stage at TiEcon 2016 as CEO and co-founder.
• 2021Leads US expansion from an Airbnb living room; ships product on cross-country drives.
• 2022Closes Series B; total raised reaches roughly US$32 million.
• 2023Sends eight smart locks to space and unlocks all of them from Earth.
• 2026An igloo smart padlock is set to accompany Jamling Tenzing Norgay up Mount Everest.

Locks in orbit, a padlock on Everest

If you want to know whether a lock is serious, ask where it has been. In August 2023, igloo sent eight smart locks to space and unlocked every one of them remotely from the ground - a proof point dressed up as a stunt, and a reminder that access control matters most where nobody can physically reach the door.

The next stage prop is closer to home but no easier to get to. In 2026, an igloo smart padlock - signed by Senior Minister of State Low Yen Ling - is set to travel with mountaineer Jamling Tenzing Norgay on an expedition up Mount Everest. From a sublet spare room to the roof of the world: the props keep getting taller.

Underneath the theater is a quieter ambition. Chow talks about smart access as the foundation of a smart city, the layer everything else sits on, because every building, locker and depot eventually has to decide who gets in. His enterprise arm, iglooworks, is built to be that layer - and he says he would rather build a billion-dollar company with as few people as possible than chase headcount for its own sake.

The founder, unlocked

For all the talk of orbits and infrastructure, Chow's reset button is ordinary on purpose. He de-stresses with a jog at East Coast Park. His comfort food is bak kut teh, the peppery pork-rib soup that is about as Singaporean as a meal gets. And he has said he would like to learn several languages - not for business, but for the sake of connecting with more people, more directly.

It tracks with the worldview. A man whose product erases a small daily friction between people - the awkward handoff of a key - turns out to care a good deal about the friction in human connection generally. The locks are just where he started.