KeyMe Locksmiths

Here is a fact that should be more surprising than it is: the American locksmith industry is worth something like $12 billion, and until fairly recently almost none of it ran through an app, a screen, or a price you could see before someone showed up at your door. You lost a key, you called a number on the side of a van, and you hoped. This is roughly the market structure of the 1970s, preserved into the smartphone era like an insect in amber.

KeyMe's founder, Greg Marsh, discovered this the way most people discover the locksmith industry - involuntarily. He needed his home's locks changed, the experience was miserable, and instead of simply complaining about it, he did the founder thing and asked whether the whole process could be rebuilt. The answer he arrived at, in 2012, was a machine. Not a person with a truck, but a kiosk: a self-service box that could scan your key, understand its geometry, and cut a copy on the spot.

The technically interesting part is that keys are harder than they look. A house key is a small piece of brass whose value lives entirely in a series of precise cuts, and there are thousands of variants. Rather than build a mechanical library, KeyMe trained neural networks on those key types - using computer vision to look at a key and infer its structure with enough precision to reproduce it. The company says its hardware and software support roughly 50 times more key types than a traditional key-cutting machine. That is the sort of number that sounds like marketing until you remember that the alternative is a human squinting at a blank and a grinding wheel.

Once you have a robot that can read keys, a few things follow almost automatically. You can put it where people already are - so KeyMe kiosks live inside Kroger, Walmart, IKEA, Menards and Rite Aid, among others. You can let people store a digital scan of a key in the cloud through a mobile app, so a lost key becomes a printable file rather than a locksmith call. And you can move beyond brass: KeyMe's kiosks handle car keys, including the ones with transponders that talk to the car, plus RFID fobs, which are the keys that don't look like keys at all.

The kiosks scaled the way good hardware scales when it hides inside someone else's foot traffic. In 2016 the company had around 200 machines and had fabricated its first million keys. By 2025 that number had crossed 7,000 kiosks, and the company expects to cut more than 10 million keys in a single year. Somewhere in there, copying a key at the grocery store stopped feeling like science fiction and started feeling like a chore you could knock out between the produce aisle and checkout.

But a key-copying kiosk has a natural ceiling, which is that people do not lose keys very often. So in 2020 KeyMe did the sensible expansionist thing and put humans back into the loop - not the old van-and-a-number humans, but a nationwide dispatch network of professional locksmiths for the jobs a machine can't do: lockouts at midnight, re-keying a new apartment, installing and repairing locks for homes, businesses and cars. The pitch is a tidy division of labor. Robots handle the routine and predictable; people handle the emergencies and the judgment. The customer, ideally, never has to know which one they're getting until it shows up.