Can AI fix lost and found?

Losing stuff sucks. It’s even more frustrating when something isn’t really lost, but rather left behind in a location, like an airport or sports stadium, which makes it hard to get back. My friend Caitlin knows this all too well; she’s yet to be reunited with the phone she lost at Oktoberfest on September 27, despite confirming in November that they have it.

While Oktoberfest is a more extreme example, people leave a lot of things behind in hotels, on transportation and at events. For example, the MTA transit system in New York collected more than 18,000 lost items from 2018 to 2023 — and that time includes when people were sheltering in place for the pandemic. Boomerang thinks AI can fix lost and found.

The Miami-based startup built software that uses machine learning to match pictures and descriptions of lost items. Customers, which can range from gyms to theme parks, upload pictures and descriptions of their lost and found while consumers do the same for the item they’ve lost. If there is a match, consumers can choose to pick up their items or have them shipped.

This model hopes to get consumers their items back faster while replacing the current system of people calling customer service desk phone lines repeatedly for updates on their items, according to Boomerang co-founder and CEO Skyler Logsdon.

The idea for the company came a few years ago when the co-founders were on a trip together to Cabo, Logsdon said. His friend, former founder of song discovery service Shazam, Philip Inghelbrecht, mentioned that his two young daughters were constantly losing things, bringing into focus how frustrating and fragmented lost and found is. This was really driven home when Inghelbrecht’s fiancée lost her ring in the Cabo airport leaving the trip.

Logsdon said they decided to build Boomerang on the same concept as Shazam: matching. Logsdon said this algorithm has to get each match exactly right, and just like Shazam, it can’t be something close enough or a guess.

“It’s not helpful [if it said] it could be one of these 10 songs,” Logsdon said regarding Shazam. “Shazam can’t get it wrong. They show you one song and that’s it.”

Boomerang announced a $4.9 million seed round this week. The round was led by LightShed Ventures with participation from GGV and SeventySix Capital, among other firms and angel investors like Drake and NFL player Christian Kirk. Logsdon said the funding will go toward onboarding new partnerships. The company currently works with a number of organizations, including State Farm Arena, home of the Atlanta Hawks, and Universal Studios Hollywood.

While I totally get why consumers would be interested in a better system for lost and found, I was less sure on why organizations — that pay for the software — would sign up. Do they really care if people get reunited with their things? Plus, would someone never go see their favorite sports team play at their home stadium again because of a bad experience with the building’s lost and found?

Logsdon said that improving this system is a pretty easy way to improve customer satisfaction, but lost and found is more of a logistical nightmare for many of these places than I guess I realized. Logsdon said that some venues collect thousands of items each event, and their customer service can’t spend the needed time to work with folks calling and emailing repeatedly to get them back.

Plus, Boomerang works with hotels and airports and other types of venues where people do leave things worth getting back, like computers, medical devices or power tools — true story, according to Logsdon — and not just a $20 water bottle or a hat.

Boomerang is also an interesting use case of applying machine learning and AI to modernize a legacy industry. A lot of AI innovation centers on making digital processes move faster, but Boomerang is using AI to automate a phone and email process. While people are still needed to upload the items to the platform, that’s a very different workload than parsing through thousands of calls and emails after each event.

Maybe Boomerang can help out Oktoberfest.

“Boomerang is [fixing] such a clear problem, it hits home for everyone,” Logsdon said. “Most people have lost something, most have been there. How does technology not solve this today? How is there not a better solution than calling?”