Chinese child-tracking smart shoes raise US$5M series A

It’s 11 pm: do you know where your children are? You do if you’ve got them outfitted in Budiu smart shoes. The shoes – the product of Beijing-based startup A&L Technology – give parents a way to track their kids when they’re on the go, and the company has raised a US$5 million series A round based on their promise. The round was led by Crystal Stream Capital, and was actually completed in September of last year, though it was only announced this week. The funds are being used to expand the Budiu team, which currently numbers around 30.

The company calls its first product “the world’s first smart GPS shoes.” That’s a pretty dubious claim – child-tracking GPS shoes have been around for years – but the shoes do look pretty cool. Parents can track their kids’ locations via smartphone at any time, set up virtual “fences” that will raise an alarm if the child moves outside them, or raise an alarm if the child moves beyond a prescribed radius from your smartphone.

The shoes come in four styles and retail for US$70 a pair. A&L’s CEO and founder Gan Zhiquan says that the company has already sold 10,000 pairs of its first-gen shoes, and it has racked up more than 20,000 preorders for the second-gen version.

If you’re looking to track your own little one, you can order the first-gen shoes in English here. It might be worth waiting for the second-gen shoes to come out, though. It’s not yet clear what new tech they might feature, but at the very least they seem to sport more interesting designs: