I was five hours from home when my partner rang. She'd just taken a call that frightened her. And I was five hours away. There was nothing I could do from there.
I've spent half my life in security. I know exactly what exists: protective escort. Camera response. Evidence documentation. A licensed professional standing at a front door within the half hour. I know the people who do this work. Some of them would have been minutes from my house that night.
And I still had no way to send one of them.
Not because of money. If you'd asked me in that moment what it was worth, the number wouldn't have mattered. The cost was never the problem. It was the how, and the how didn't exist. No number to ring, no app to open, no channel that connects an ordinary person at an ordinary address to the licensed professionals already working their suburb. These services have existed for decades: for banks, for cash-in-transit, for executives, for corporations. For my partner, alone in our home, they may as well not have existed at all.
That's the locked catalogue: a whole industry of protection, real and trained and licensed and insured, that ordinary people cannot reach in the moment they need it. I couldn't accept that the industry I'd given half my life to had no door for the person I love.
So I built the door.
Boby connects invited residents to licensed local security firms in their own postcode, through an AI Companion that answers at any hour, and a record that belongs entirely to them. Every firm on the platform is verified continuously: licence, insurance, certifications. And when help needs to be human, it's a local firm, under its own licence, at a real door.
One rule seals it: Boby takes zero commission. No percentage, no lead fees, no cut of anything a firm earns. Firms subscribe to their postcodes, and the fare is untouched. Like Uber, except nobody takes a cut of the fare. I didn't build this to sit between my neighbours and their protection, clipping tickets. I built it so the next time that call comes, to me or to anyone, the answer is different.
That night, there was no one to send.
Now there's someone to send.
Brandon Mathews, Founder, Boby