$5 Billion in Lost Property – and Nobody's Built the Fix

01 /The Concept

Boomerang is a service for finding lost items at public venues.

The workflow is simple:

- You enter a description of what you lost and attach a photo if you have one. - The search engine regularly scans a database of items that have been turned in at public venues. - When a match appears, you receive a notification to confirm whether it's your item. If it is, you contact the venue through the app and arrange retrieval or delivery.

The core technical challenge: the description and photo of the lost item often look nothing like the venue's photo and description of what they found – because different people describe and photograph objects very differently.

Boomerang addresses this with purpose-built AI that intelligently matches arbitrary descriptions and images of sought items against the varied records of found items logged by venues.

The platform distributes through partners – the public venues themselves: stadiums, airports, concert halls, hotels, gyms, university campuses. Their incentive to join: the service saves staff time currently consumed by handling lost-and-found inquiries manually.

One venue reported cutting the staff time spent on lost-item interactions by 50% while simultaneously increasing the return rate by 20% – a better experience for visitors at lower operational cost.

Venues don't need to install any special software. They simply connect to Boomerang's cloud platform, where staff upload photos and descriptions of found items, and add a link to the search service on the venue's website or app. Boomerang monetizes through venue subscriptions; the search service is free for the public.

One of the founders was co-founder of Shazam (acquired by Apple) and president of TrueCar (which went public). The other two founders also bring substantial startup track records.

That pedigree helped the team raise an initial $2.8M in November 2021 to build the platform, which launched in May 2022. Boomerang has now raised an additional $4.9M.

02 /Why It Matters

Boomerang has taken a methodical, category-by-category expansion approach.

Immediately after launch, the team focused on stadiums. Most stadiums host events once a week or every two weeks, and each event generates roughly 100 lost-item reports. That cadence provided a controlled environment for training the AI under real-world conditions.

As the AI reached acceptable performance, Boomerang moved into universities and colleges in late 2022. (A side note: students at UK universities reportedly lose chargers and cables worth over £1M per year – and UK parents spend £42–65M annually replacing school uniform items their children have lost.)

By early 2023, the team was ready to target higher-volume venues: airports. By summer 2023, they had signed two US airports as clients.

The TSA reports that approximately 100,000 items are left behind by passengers in US airports every year. That statistic prompted the question: how much do Americans collectively spend replacing things they've lost at public venues?

The answer: roughly $5 billion per year – spent replacing items left in airports, stadiums, concert halls, theme parks, hotels, and gyms.

That's a $5 billion "market" in a single country – one that can be addressed simply by signing up the venues where people most reliably lose their things.

It's also worth noting that dozens of platforms for finding lost property already exist, all operating on the same venue-partnership model. This is a useful reminder: genuinely novel ideas are rare. Whatever you think of, someone has probably tried a version of it. That's not a reason not to build – but it is a reason never to assume that being first is a competitive moat.

03 /Opportunities

A [review from spring 2023](/review/vsjakaja-fignja-jeto-horoshaja-tema) looked at a startup that had built a project management tool for creative professionals – people who find project management a burden rather than a feature. (The startup has since pivoted to storing and organizing creative assets, but the central insight from that review still stands.)

The insight: "Any annoying peripheral task is a good theme"

Most startups aim at the core workflow of their target audience – which creates fierce competition in every mainstream category. But every person and every organization also loses meaningful time and energy to peripheral activities they can't avoid. Those side tasks are underserved, for the simple reason that no one prioritizes optimizing something that's not central to their work. But that also means people experience those tasks as friction – and would readily pay to reduce it.

Handling lost-and-found inquiries is precisely that kind of peripheral headache for venue operators. They spend staff time on it, but it's not a strategic priority – so they never invest in solving it. Arrive with a ready-made solution that cuts that friction, requires almost nothing from them operationally, and has a modest price tag – and the "why not?" question answers itself.

The broader opportunity: build platforms that reduce the time and effort that a well-defined target audience involuntarily spends on peripheral tasks.

You probably understand certain audiences well – either because you've been part of them, or because you've studied them while evaluating startup ideas. But you've likely focused on their primary jobs to be done.

Now look at their situation from a different angle. What peripheral tasks do they reluctantly maintain – the ones that drain time and energy precisely because they pull people away from their real work? A platform that eliminates that burden while improving the outcome quality doesn't need to fight for attention: it arrives at a problem the target audience already wants solved.

That "annoying side stuff" might just be the most interesting theme in the room.