Loopt

Sam Altman's first company: see where your friends are, years before phones could

Shut down
19902026

Loopt was a mobile "social mapping" service founded in 2005 by Stanford sophomore Sam Altman with Nick Sivo and Alok Deshpande, one of the first Y Combinator companies. It showed where your friends were on a map, first on Boost Mobile and Sprint phones in 2006 and then on the iPhone, reached about four million registered users, and lost the location race to Foursquare and the phone makers themselves. Green Dot bought it for $43.4 million in March 2012 and shut it down.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2005
  2. June 2005 Launch
    Loopt is founded

    Three Stanford students join the first Y Combinator batch.

  3. 2006
  4. 2006 Launch
    Launch on Boost Mobile

    Friends on a map, as a carrier subscription.

  5. 2008
  6. 10 July 2008 Feature
    On the iPhone App Store

    One of the first apps on launch day.

  7. 2010
  8. 9 July 2010 Peak
    Four million users

    The peak of the registered base.

  9. 2012
  10. 9 March 2012 Acquisition
    Sold to Green Dot for $43.4 million

    The buyer wants the team and the patents, not the app.

  11. 2012 Shutdown
    Loopt closes

    The service is switched off during 2012.

The site through time

Browse loopt.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Loopt, Inc. 2005–2012 Founded Founded by Sam Altman, Nick Sivo and Alok Deshpande; a Y Combinator summer 2005 company
Green Dot Corporation 2012–2012 Acquisition, $43.4M Bought the team and patents for $43.4 million and closed the app

Key figures [edit]

MetricValueAs ofConfidence
Registered accounts ▲ 4 million 9 July 2010 Reported Announced by the company in July 2010

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: On 9 March 2012 Loopt was sold to Green Dot, a prepaid debit card company, for $43.4 million in cash, with the announcement stating that Loopt's products would be shut down and the 30 staff would become Green Dot's mobile team. Reports at the time put the app's remaining daily audience in the hundreds. The service closed later in 2012.

Our analysis: Loopt had the right idea in 2005, when it had to persuade carriers to preload it and pay to see a friend on a map, and by the time the iPhone made location free for everyone, Foursquare had turned the same idea into a game and Facebook and Apple were building it into the phone. A location layer is not a business on its own; Altman's later companies did rather better.

History [edit]

Friends on a map

Loopt was founded in 2005 by three Stanford students, Sam Altman, Nick Sivo and Alok Deshpande, and was one of the eight companies in Y Combinator's first summer batch. The idea was simple and, in 2005, difficult: show you a map with your friends on it, in real time, from your phone. Before the iPhone that meant working with the carriers, and Loopt launched on Boost Mobile in 2006 and Sprint in 2007 as a subscription service, followed by Verizon, AT&T and, in July 2008, one of the first iPhone App Store apps.

Altman, 19 when he started the company, became a familiar face in the coverage of location privacy: Loopt built consent screens and anti-stalking safeguards into the product early and made privacy its public argument. The company raised about $17 million from Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates and reached around four million registered users by 2010.

Overtaken

Once every smartphone had GPS and a map, the question was what to do with location, and Foursquare's answer, checking in for points, badges and mayorships, beat Loopt's answer of passive tracking. Loopt pivoted to check-ins and deals in 2009, added a Groupon-style offers product and a Q&A app, and never found the growth loop that made Foursquare briefly the hottest company in San Francisco.

On 9 March 2012 Green Dot Corporation, which sells prepaid debit cards, bought Loopt for $43.4 million in cash, including retention payments, primarily to acquire its 30-person mobile team and its patents. Green Dot said Loopt's products would be shut down, and the app closed later that year. Reports of the sale noted the daily audience had dwindled to a few hundred people.

Afterlife

Altman went on to run Y Combinator and then OpenAI, and Loopt is now mostly remembered as his first company. Its patents on location sharing were among the assets Green Dot wanted; the idea itself became a checkbox in every messaging app.

The domain today

loopt.com is dormant; it no longer serves the service and Green Dot has not used the name.

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Sources [edit]

  1. Loopt lets cellphone users find friends nearby The New York Times 6 February 2008 [archived]
  2. Loopt hits 4 million users, propelled by iOS 4 and Android TechCrunch 9 July 2010 [archived]
  3. Loopt's Sam Altman on why he sold to Green Dot for $43.4M AllThingsD 9 March 2012 [archived]

Last verified: 15 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).