MechSE alumnus on his second wind with Jiobit

Roger Ady (BSME ’84) has enjoyed a lucrative career that experienced success even after a brief attempt at retirement. The engineer-turned-entrepreneur credits discipline developed during his college years with allowing him to successfully tackle challenges with limited time and resources.

“My time at U of I was in a large way about gathering the discipline to live on my own within a budget and manage my activities in a way that allowed me to get an academic footing for my career aspirations,” said Ady, who recalled focusing his attention throughout college on maintaining a strong GPA, funding his room and board through part-time work, and participating in team sports and social gatherings. “I still feel that living on a college campus away from home with a set budget was one of the most valuable parts of my U of I experience. It played a huge role in my ability to find career opportunities post-graduation.”

After graduating with his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, Ady worked for Western Electric and then Bell Laboratories. Bell Labs offered a program that funded master’s degrees, allowing Ady to earn an MS in mechanical engineering at Stanford University.

“One notable project I took part in [at Stanford] was a force sensor glove for military pilots that allowed them to point at targets with visual wireframe computer feedback,” Ady said. “The CEO of that startup is credited with coining the term ‘Virtual Reality.’”

Completing his master’s through Bell Labs’ program put Ady on a fast track for becoming a Member of Technical Staff. After assuming this role, he later moved up to an engineering management position. Bell Labs offered a similar program for people in his position to enter business programs, and Ady earned his MBA at Benedictine University. “Being a quantitative person, I really took to the accounting programs and that has helped me to this day,” Ady said.

Ady left Bell Labs in 1995 to join Motorola, where he eventually became heavily involved in inventing and developing hardware such as cable modems, infrastructure equipment, and cell phones, beginning with the Razr.

He garnered 60+ utility patents during his time in product development, staying with Motorola until his retirement in 2015.  However, retiring from business proved short-lived. A few months later, Ady’s friend and fellow retiree from Motorola, John Renaldi, had a traumatic experience that would inspire the pair to develop a new tracking device they called Jiobit. Renaldi’s young son was lost for half an hour in Maggie Daley Park in Chicago.

“[The experience] ended well, but being tech-savvy, [John] envisioned a better way to make a power-efficient child safety device in case your child was to get lost, and he incorporated Jio as a new business to realize his vision,” Ady explained. “The enticement of a new type of multi-radio device (cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth) intrigued me, and once he mentioned he was looking for hardware support, I joined him as co-founder of Jio.”

Designed to be worn by pets, children, or adults, Jiobit devices interface with an app to provide users with real-time location updates and movement alerts. The app includes features such as 24/7 access to emergency dispatch, customized alerts based on geographic preferences, and communal safety through location sharing with other users.

The company looks different now than at its advent. “We were acquired by a larger company called Life 360 [in 2021], and Life 360 subsequently purchased Tile, Inc,” Ady said, noting that the company very quickly grew from a 35-employee enterprise to part of a 500-employee global entity. “The goal now is to find synergies among the three companies. I continue to operate in the intellectual property space, generating and vetting new ideas and helping prosecute our patent filings as well as cross-pollinating the three patent portfolios each company had built pre-consolidation.”

Ady’s roots in engineering continue to serve as the foundation for his success. “The ‘engineering process’ that was permanently ingrained in me at U of I is at the core of all the work I have done throughout my career,” he reflected. And of the discipline that has guided him throughout his decades-long career, “[It] comes full circle from when your parents leave you to your own devices in the dorm room and you muster the discipline to budget your time and money and to power through the curriculum to get everything you can out of it.”