Family tracking,
without the surveillance
NearCircle exists because the category sold out. Life360 sold precise location data — including children's — to roughly a dozen data brokers. GeoZilla hid unsubscribe flows behind "fraudulent" billing, according to users. FamiSafe crashed iOS devices. We thought: families deserve better.
Why we're here
Privacy is not
a feature.
Most family apps treat privacy like a checkbox. It's three paragraphs at the bottom of a settings screen, written in language the app's own lawyers wouldn't understand. Meanwhile the data itself flows to ad networks, analytics vendors, and data brokers. Your kid's walk to school becomes a row in somebody's database.
We think that's a betrayal. So we built NearCircle ground-up around a different model: if we don't need your data to run the product, we don't collect it. If we do collect it, we encrypt it. If we can process it on your phone, we don't ship it to a server. And we will never — ever — sell it. Not to brokers, not to advertisers, not to insurers. That's the whole point.
What we stand for
Three pillars.
No compromises.
Every feature decision passes through these three gates. If it fails one, we don't ship it.
Privacy you can verify
End-to-end encryption on location sharing. On-device AI for routines, fall detection, and driving behavior. A legally binding no-data-selling pledge. Full data export and deletion in two taps.
- → Heat maps stay on your phone
- → AI routines never leave your device
- → Analytics are anonymous (TelemetryDeck)
Reliability you can trust
Life360 famously misses crash events. Findmykids shows your kid as "at home" when they're not. We built tracking that actually works: motion-aware GPS sampling, instant geofence alerts, SOS that fires in two seconds.
- → Battery-efficient background tracking
- → Instant geofence arrival/departure
- → SOS with 2-second trigger
Care beyond kids
Every other family tracker assumes your family is parents + teens. We added Elderly Care for aging parents, Couples Mode for partners, and temporary circles for travel — features nobody else ships.
- → Fall detection + medication reminders
- → Couples mood emoji + shared timeline
- → Temporary circles for trips and events
Manifesto
Made with privacy in mind.
We believe location sharing should feel like handing someone a key to your front door — a gesture of trust, not a transaction. You should know exactly who has the key. You should be able to take it back. And the locksmith who cut the key shouldn't be able to copy it.
We believe safety features should actually work. If a crash detection feature fails when it matters, it wasn't a feature — it was decoration.
We believe the companies that care for aging parents deserve the same quality tools as the ones that track teens. Elderly care is not an afterthought at NearCircle. It's built in from day one.
We believe profit and privacy can coexist, but only if you decide upfront that privacy wins every tie-breaker. We decided.
If any of this resonates, we'd love to have you in the beta.
Zenly, 40M users, killed 2023
What Zenly got right
Location sharing
should feel fun.
Zenly had 40 million monthly users sharing live locations with friends. They made it feel social — emoji avatars, activity indicators, mood. Then Snap bought them and killed them, mid-growth, during layoffs.
The demand never went away. It's still there — people still want to share their location with the people they love without it feeling like surveillance. We're bringing that energy back, with privacy and safety baked in from the start.
Who's building this
Small team. Long memory.
NearCircle is built by a small team of privacy-minded engineers, designers, and parents. We use the app ourselves, with our own families. Every bug report is a group chat message from someone whose mom just got a false SOS alert. We take it personally.
We're intentionally small and intentionally not VC-funded. No growth-at-all-costs pressure to monetize your data. Revenue comes from subscriptions, full stop.