Company overview
AliphCom, Inc. (doing business as Aliph, then Jawbone) was an American consumer-electronics company headquartered in San Francisco. It was founded in 1999 by Alexander Asseily and Hosain Rahman (some court filings date the founding to 1998). It was privately held and venture-backed, raising several hundred million dollars from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia; press reports put its peak 2014 valuation around $3.2 billion. It was never publicly traded and entered liquidation in 2017.
Products / services / operations
AliphCom began with noise-reduction audio technology aimed at military communications, then commercialized Bluetooth headsets (Jawbone brand) and Bluetooth speakers (Jambox). In 2013 it acquired BodyMedia, Inc., a maker of body-monitoring wearables, which became a co-plaintiff in its litigation. Around 2011 it rebranded as Jawbone and focused on fitness and health-tracking wearables, competing with Fitbit, Samsung and others. It was an operating hardware company, not a shell licensor.
Patent-litigation posture
In the tracked data, AliphCom appears once, as plaintiff, in the Northern District of California (Judge Haywood S. Gilliam, Jr.) — the company's home district, not a plaintiff-friendly venue like the Eastern District of Texas. This reflects an operating company asserting its own developed patents against a direct competitor, not an NPE campaign. Note that Fitbit separately counterclaimed and sued AliphCom in the District of Delaware and N.D. Cal. in 2015, so AliphCom was effectively a two-way litigant.
Notable cases and context
The tracked case, AliphCom et al. v. Fitbit, Inc. (filed June 10, 2015), involved six patents and was stayed in December 2015 pending a parallel ITC investigation, with dismissal with prejudice in December 2017. After Jawbone's liquidation, its patent portfolio was acquired by Jawbone Innovations LLC, which has since asserted those patents against Apple, Google and Samsung in Texas venues — a distinct entity from AliphCom itself. Employee counts could not be verified from the sources reviewed.