Our Story – How Meili GPS is Changing GPS Tracking for Schools & Adventures

Meili was the brainchild of Stu Wells and Simon Purves, both directors of a technology company based in Oxford, England:

"We both love the outdoors — whether it's the serenity of dawn camping alone in the Highlands of Scotland, the rush of skiing fresh powder in the Alps, or the awe you feel kayaking on a Norwegian fjord.

MeiliGPS was born from a need we felt personally: for a simple, rugged outdoor GPS tracking solution that could keep tabs on groups and individuals in the outdoors.

Simon is a DofE Organiser and a school governor, and he'd grown frustrated trying to find an affordable, effective GPS system for his school's expeditions. We saw an urgent need across organisations to properly manage risk when sending groups outdoors — particularly groups of children and young adults. There have been too many headlines showing what can happen when things go wrong.

We both ski regularly with our families and friends, and we've each experienced incidents where someone in our party — including us — was injured and faced a long wait to be found and helped.

In short, we saw a need for a system to safely monitor people in the outdoors using GPS. It had to be affordable, and it had to work in the wild, remote places people actually go to.

We saw the need. With MeiliGPS, we believed we could meet it. So we built it — and we hope you'll be as pleased with the result as we are."

— Stu Wells, CEO, MeiliGPS

"We started out designing an app that would let groups stay connected outdoors by seeing where each other's phones were, across platforms — a bit like Find My iPhone, but with dedicated outdoor maps such as Ordnance Survey in the UK.

We soon ran into a problem: mobile signal is too patchy in the places people actually want to use an app like this — national parks, mountains, remote trails.

We also found that a smartphone's GPS drains its battery fast, especially in cold conditions — often reducing tracking to less than a day. That's a serious issue for expedition tracking, or even a ski trip: no one wants their phone's GPS to flatten the battery and leave them with no communication at all.

Our conclusion: in the outdoors, a smartphone should be treated as a comms device, not relied on as a location tracker. It's the wrong tool for the job.

On top of that, high-end phones are too expensive to equip a whole team with just for tracking, and using personal phones to track people outdoors — especially under-18s — raises real privacy and safeguarding concerns.

So phones weren't the answer. We needed something more affordable: a GPS device built for one purpose only — tracking people outdoors, reliably.

We set out to design a lightweight, personal GPS tracker that could run independently for at least 10 days, with a battery strong enough to handle cold conditions. It needed to be weatherproof, and — critically — it needed to cost under £100 per unit, so teams could afford to equip every member with one.

And at the heart of it all: safeguarding. Our MeiliGPS apps are built to the highest security standards, hosted in UK-based Microsoft Azure data centres, and protected by multi-level authentication and permissions that control exactly who can access tracker data, and for how long.

MeiliGPS is the most secure GPS tracking system for individuals and groups in the outdoors available today.

Why does that matter so much?

Because unauthorised access to location data simply isn't acceptable — especially when the people being tracked are vulnerable, like children on DofE expeditions or families on ski trips."

- Simon Purves, CTO

And so MeiliGPS was born — named after Meili, son of Odin and the Norse god of travellers: the Mile Stepper. It seemed somehow fitting.

Meili GPS is a new brand built around a new concept.

Meili combines next-gen GPS & NB-IoT personal trackers, purpose-designed for the outdoors, with a dedicated "tracker tracking" app — MeiliGPS for iOS and Android, and with a secure web portal allowing you to see all your trackers on a big screen.

Meili offers targeted functionality for tracking individuals and groups outdoors, along with features designed to help you manage risk — particularly when working with young people. These include the Meili Sharing Centre (for securely sharing tracker data with third parties), 1:25,000-scale maps, and the ability to safely monitor multiple Meili trackers, anywhere in the world.

Whether you're running DofE (Duke of Edinburgh Award) expeditions, Scout or Cadet activities, or other Outward Bound programmes — or you're an employer with staff lone-working in remote locations, or simply have a family member who likes to venture out solo — or you're a ski school wanting to safeguard all your clients on the slopes — MeiliGPS was designed with you in mind.

— Stu Wells & Simon Purves