Built by a dad who got
angry enough to do something.

A few months ago, a dad of four sat down to pick a family location app. His kids were getting older — practices, friends' houses, the school across town — and he wanted to know they were safe. He landed on the obvious choice. The big one. The one with the purple logo.

Before paying for the membership, he did what every careful parent does: he looked into what he was buying. The price tag wasn't small, and he wanted to know why.

That's when he started reading.

Life360's data business had been selling its users' precise location data — including the locations of children — to data brokers, insurance companies, and hedge funds. The Markup's December 2021 investigation documented roughly forty buyers and tens of millions of affected families. After public pressure, Life360 announced in January 2022 that it would stop selling raw, precise location data to brokers — while continuing to sell aggregated location data to firms including Placer.ai, and continuing its work with Arity, the Allstate-owned data subsidiary it later acquired. Life360's 2024 SEC prospectus and 2024 annual report both describe the sale of "aggregated, non-personally identifiable data for data insight purposes" as a continuing revenue stream.

He didn't pay.

He kept reading. The privacy policy. The terms. The financial filings. He learned that the location data had been packaged, sold, and resold across an industry he'd never heard of, to companies his family had never agreed to share anything with. Somewhere in that data — somewhere in the movement patterns of millions of children moving between home and school and practice and friends' houses — was information that could put kids at risk if it ended up in the wrong hands.

So he looked for an alternative. There were a handful of "privacy-focused" family apps out there, but every one of them was missing something — real-time location, geofencing, or the actual encryption math behind the marketing word. None of them did the job without a compromise.

That was the moment. Not a business decision. A dad decision. Enough is enough.

So he built the alternative.

He had the engineering background. He'd built consumer apps before. He understood encryption well enough to know what was possible — and what most of the industry wasn't bothering with. He started writing code on nights and weekends, around the kids and the day job, with a single principle: the server should be incapable of reading what he was sending it.

That principle is the entire product.

Every location update your phone sends to VeraMap is encrypted on your device before it leaves your hands, using the same cryptography that powers Signal. The encryption keys are generated on, and live only on, the phones in your loop. By the time a location update reaches our servers, it's an opaque blob of bytes that we cannot decrypt — under any circumstance, including a subpoena. Selling it isn't a policy choice we made. It's a mathematical impossibility. See exactly what our server stores for the side-by-side comparison.

The implication is simple, and it's the part most companies will never let themselves say plainly: we don't trust ourselves with your family's location data, so we built a system where we don't have to.

The name is the whole idea.

Vera is Latin for true. We named the app VeraMap because we wanted the name to be the standard we'd be measured against. A family location app that tells you the truth, exactly as it is, and never sells it to anyone.

Look closely at the logo. Inside the location pin is a four-point star — the navigator's mark for True North. Sailors and explorers have navigated by the North Star for thousands of years. Not because it's the brightest, but because it's the one that never moves. When everything else shifts, True North holds.

Your family is your True North. We just built the map.

What we are. What we aren't.

VeraMap does one thing. We help families know that everyone got home, everyone's safe, everyone's where they're supposed to be. We do that as well as anyone has done it, and we do it without selling a single byte of what you give us. That's the whole product.

We don't bundle roadside assistance. We don't sell identity theft protection. We don't run a credit monitoring service or a stolen-fund reimbursement program. Most families already have those things from their car insurance, their bank, or their employer — and bundling them is usually how a family-safety company tries to justify a price tag that the core product can't carry on its own. We didn't want that problem. So we didn't build it.

What we did build is a free tier that covers the essential thing — real-time location, alerts when someone gets home safe, Ghost Mode, end-to-end encryption — for as many families as we can support. And a paid tier, VeraMap Plus, that adds history and intelligence for the families who want more. That's our entire business model. No data deals running quietly in the background. No venture-capital subsidy waiting to be repaid by monetizing you later. Just families paying us to keep them connected — and us paying that trust back by building the most private, most honest version of this product anyone has shipped.

Why we tell you this story.

Because the origin matters. This product wasn't designed in a conference room. It wasn't built to capture a market. It was built by a parent who looked at what was being done to families like his, and built the alternative he wished existed. The anger was the fuel. What it produced was conviction: that families deserve better, that privacy and safety are the same goal, and that it's possible to build a product that proves it.

When we communicate with you — in the app, in marketing, in support, anywhere — we want to carry that energy. Not the anger. The conviction.

If you've ever felt uneasy about a family app, if you've ever wondered what it was doing with your kids' data, if you've ever wished there was an option built by someone who actually shared your values: we built it for you. Welcome to the loop.