Philly maker of hand-held device tracking software for retailers plans expansion after big investment

Asset Recharge Center (ARC), a Philadelphia firm whose software and sensor systems track and recharge hand-held devices used by workers at Walmart, Lululemon and other big retail store and warehouse companies, has raised $60 million from a New York tech investor.

The investment, from Acadia Investment Partners will help the company boost sales to grocers, airlines, governments, and other new customers.

It’s the first big outside investment for ARC, which started in 2011 as the Chargeitspot cellphone-charging service for customers of stores such as Bloomingdale’s and Target. It switched focus to workers’ electronics when customers were barred from stores during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Earlier it was backed by smaller investors from locally based Robin Hood Ventures, Soundboard Angel Fund, and start-up millionaires.

ARC, which says it has been used by workers to check out and return electronic tools 130 million times since 2021, is poised to grow fast “as frontline operations become increasingly technology dependent,” Acadia founder Harsh Agarwal said in a statement. He and Acadia “operating advisor” Peter Schmitt joined ARC’s board under terms of their investment deal.

“We started the business to solve a consumer-facing problem — the [panic] when batteries run out,” said ARC CEO Douglas Baldasare, a Villanova native and Wharton School graduate. British health officials identified the condition in the early smartphone era as nomophobia.

Stores found customers spent more time shopping and bought more items when their phones were stationed at Chargeitspots. The COVID shutdowns forced founder Douglas Baldasare to find new applications for what his team had learned about securing, tracking, and charging devices.

He studied the losses retailers and warehouses were suffering when they issued electronic devices to track inventory and workflow that ended up lost, left home, or piled in bins of non-working appliances companies shipped back to manufacturers like Zebra and Honeywell.

Those makers too often found that after a device was offline for weeks or month, the only problem was a bad cable or battery that could have been resolved quickly if the problem were diagnosed, marked and recorded in a useful way — the problem ARC addresses.

“We realized managing these devices at scale was very difficult,” Baldasare said. “Companies were still using manual check-ins and check-outs on clipboards. Workers were standing in queues every shift; it was inefficient.”

“You’re working in a chaotic field environment where people tend not to follow rules,” Baldasare said. “Things break. You need an effective, efficient way to secure and maintain your hardware. We had unintentionally built a system” for retail customers’ phones that could be applied to worker devices.

By adding automatic employee sign-in, check-back, tracking, and data reporting systems, ARC cut losses, according to customers.

ARC ensures employees have access to the ”next best available device, fully charged and in optimal working condition” every day, Lani Lindsay, vice president of central operations for Walmart Canada, said in a statement. Walmart’s Sam’s Club stores in the U.S. also use ARC.

“ARC’s ‘smart locker’ system has made a material difference for our business,” said Divey Gulati, cofounder of Chicago-based ShipBob, a contract shipper that competes with Amazon. “We’ve dramatically reduced time spent managing devices.”

About 100 people work for ARC, a headcount that founder Baldasare said will grow as ARC uses Acadia funds to add staff.

Philadelphia has a reputation as a low-turnover labor market for tech employers, said Baldasare, who recruits Drexel co-ops, along with students from other area schools. “It’s a really smart, roll-up-your-sleeves population, who, when they find a happy place, reward you by sticking around to grow with the company.”