Losing your friends at a major music festival is an inevitability. It happens gradually. One person veers toward a food vendor, another disappears into a crowd pushing toward the stage, phones come out and then fail. Even when messages and calls connect, there’s no meaningful way to describe where you are in a sea of tens of thousands of people moving in every direction at once.
“You turn around, and the person you thought was right next to you isn’t there anymore,” Carter Fowler says. “Everyone knows that feeling. There’s a spike of anxiety when you realize they’re gone – and then complete relief when you find them again.”
For Fowler, that emotional arc became not just a shared human experience but the foundation of a company.
Totem, the Chattanooga-based startup he cofounded, has built a device designed to do one simple thing: point you toward the people you’re looking for, no matter the environment, without relying on cell service, Wi-Fi or any traditional network.
In a little more than two years, the company has grown from a festival-born idea into a profitable hardware business with more than 50,000 users across 75 countries, fueled by viral attention and a product resonating far beyond its original use.
The story begins, as many good ideas do, with a problem.
A dilemma everyone understands
The origin moment traces back to 2019, at Electric Daisy Carnival Orlando, better known as EDC, one of the largest electronic music festivals in the world. For Chase Lemonds, an engineer attending his first major festival, the experience was overwhelming in more ways than one.
“Someone stole his phone on Day 1,” says Fowler, Totem’s CEO. “That’s a classic story at those events. Even when your phone isn’t stolen, it can be useless. Networks are overloaded, signals drop and it still doesn’t help you find people in a crowd like that.”
As Lemonds wandered through a crowd of more than 100,000 people, he noticed the glowing bracelets and light-up accessories scattered throughout the festival. The idea came quickly and intuitively: What if those devices could do more than glow? What if they could guide you?
“He said, ‘I could make one of those bracelets, but it would actually have a purpose. It could point you to your friends,’” Fowler recalls.
At the time, it was just an idea. The technology required to make it work with precision – in real time and at meaningful range – didn’t exist, but the idea stayed with him.
Fowler and Lemonds met a few years later while consulting for another startup, with Fowler handling go-to-market strategy and Lemonds leading research and development. The partnership formed quickly.
“Chase is a brilliant engineer – probably the smartest guy I’ve ever met,” Fowler says. (Lemonds had a role in developing the popular Sponge Daddy, a sponge that softens in warm water and stiffens in cold.)
“His head is always buzzing with new ideas. When I met him, he had five or six different inventions on his desk – tiny drones, robotic hands, all kinds of things. But the idea from the festival was different. It solved a problem everyone understands immediately.”
For Fowler, who has deep ties to music and festival culture, that immediacy mattered – and aligned with his background in marketing and brand strategy.
“I’ve spent my career thinking about how to explain products in a way that people instantly get,” he says. “This was one of those rare ideas where you don’t have to convince someone that the problem exists. They already know it because they’ve lived it.”
From bracelet to compass
The earliest version of the product looked nothing like what Totem would eventually release.
Initially, the concept took shape as a bracelet – something similar to the light-up accessories that had inspired it. But as development progressed, both founders began to recognize a fundamental flaw.
“It wasn’t a great user experience,” Fowler says. “If you think about how you naturally hold your wrist when you’re walking, the light would always be on the opposite side. You couldn’t see it.”
Just as important, the product was difficult to explain in a simple, intuitive way.
“There’s a principle in go-to-market strategy that the simpler you can make your message, the more powerful it becomes,” Fowler says. “If people can immediately understand what something is, they can also explain it to someone else. That’s how things spread.”
The breakthrough came when they shifted the concept from a bracelet to a compass.
“One thing everyone in the world understands is a compass,” Fowler says. “It’s one of the most ancient tools we have. So the moment we made that shift, we could describe it in three words: a friend-finding compass.”
The device that emerged from that pivot is roughly the size of a cookie and designed to be worn as a pendant. It communicates not through screens or text, but through light – each bonded friend represented by a color, each direction indicated by a glowing signal that grows stronger as you move closer.
“You don’t need a map or coordinates,” Fowler says. “You just follow the light.”
Underneath that simplicity is a complex technical system. Each Totem Compass determines its position using satellite signals, then communicates that information through a decentralized, peer-to-peer mesh network that exists entirely between devices. There’s no reliance on cellular infrastructure or internet connectivity.
“The internet is a centralized network,” Fowler explains. “What we’ve built is essentially a decentralized intranet that forms automatically between devices. As long as there are three or more Totems in an area, they begin to create this mesh network that extends range and strengthens communication.”
In ideal conditions, the device can guide users to within a few feet of one another, updating location in real time, second by second.
The more devices in the area, the more powerful the network becomes – even if those devices belong to strangers.
“You might be trying to find your friend, and someone you’ve never met is walking between you with their Totem,” Fowler says. “That person becomes a node in the network. They extend your range without even realizing it. So you have your group, but you’re also part of this broader network that helps everyone stay connected.”
Tested in chaos
That system was not refined in a lab alone.
“There are certain environments you just can’t simulate,” Fowler says. “You can test things in controlled conditions, but that doesn’t compare to being on the ground in the real world.”
To understand how the device would perform, Fowler and Lemonds took it directly into the environments it was designed for: massive music festivals, dense urban gatherings and sprawling outdoor events.
“You might be in a 15-acre space with hundreds of thousands of people,” Fowler says. “There’s Wi-Fi signals being broadcast everywhere, metal structures all around you, constant motion. It’s one of the most chaotic environments you can imagine.”
Each festival introduced a different technical challenge.
At Ultra Music Festival in Miami, density became the primary issue. High-rise buildings surrounded the venue, reflecting signals and compressing crowds into tight spaces.
“We were dealing with one of the densest environments in the world,” Fowler says. “Everything was happening on top of itself.”
At Bonnaroo, the challenge shifted. The event stretched across dozens of acres, forcing the technology to maintain accuracy and responsiveness over longer distances.
“Now we were thinking about range,” Fowler says. “How far can it go? How quickly can it update?”
The team tested across both extremes and everything in between, often troubleshooting issues in real time.
“We learned more in a few weekends at festivals than we ever could have in months of controlled testing,” Fowler says. “It forced us to build something that actually works where it matters.”
Going viral before it existed
In February 2024, Fowler posted a short video from his home office.
At the time, Totem had a few hundred social media followers and a couple dozen email subscribers. The product was not yet on the market.
Within five days, the video had been viewed more than 38 million times.
“It was just the words ‘friend-finding compass’ on the screen,” Fowler says. “That was it. And it exploded.”
The response was immediate and overwhelming. More than 24,000 people signed up for the waitlist within weeks – many of them treating the product as if it already existed.
“We had people saying, ‘I’ve needed this my whole life,’” Fowler says. “And at that point, we’d just started the company.”
The momentum didn’t slow. Over the next two years, Totem’s content generated hundreds of millions of views across social media, with dozens of videos surpassing the million-view mark.
For most early-stage startups, awareness is often the biggest hurdle. For Totem, awareness arrived almost overnight.
“The challenge wasn’t getting people to know about us,” Fowler says. “It was keeping up with the demand once they did.”
Funding the company
Turning that surge of demand into a physical product required capital.
In 2024, Totem raised a $1.3 million pre-seed round, drawing support from angel investors around the world. For a Chattanooga-based startup, it marked one of the largest pre-seed raises of its kind.
“It gave us the ability to actually build the product at scale,” Fowler says. “Hardware is different. You have to commit up front. You have to manufacture and get it into people’s hands.”
As the company has grown, its approach to funding has shifted.
Totem is now raising a second round through a community equity crowdfunding campaign on WeFunder, opening the door for everyday users to invest in the company.
“It’s a way for people who believe in what we’re building to actually have ownership in it,” Fowler says. “That hasn’t historically been accessible unless you’re a traditional investor.”
By early 2025, the company had shipped more than 23,000 units worldwide and entered its first full festival season.
What followed was a different kind of validation.
“We started going to festivals and seeing people wearing them everywhere,” Fowler says. “At one event, we had 7% of attendees using Totems. For a first-year hardware product, that’s pretty significant.”
From shipping to iterating
For many hardware companies, shipping marks the end of development. For Totem, it marked the beginning of another phase.
Since launch, the company has pushed a steady stream of firmware updates – 17 so far – optimizing how the device performs and setting an expectation among users that the product they receive won’t remain static for long.
“We’ve trained our community to expect that,” Fowler says. “The device keeps getting better.”
Those updates have touched nearly every aspect of the experience. Early versions of the product refreshed location data every four seconds. Now, that interval has been reduced to one, allowing for near real-time tracking. Battery life has improved, responsiveness has sharpened and the underlying mesh network has become more efficient with each iteration.
“When we first shipped, it was every four seconds. Now it’s every second,” Fowler says. “And that’s just one example. Everything is evolving.”
Some of the changes are highly technical, tied to the algorithms that govern how devices communicate and adapt to different environments. Others are more immediate, shaped by how people actually use the product once it leaves the lab.
“The SOS button wasn’t red originally – it was black,” Fowler says. “That’s something we changed once we saw how people were using it.”
Taken together, those refinements point to a different kind of hardware life cycle, one that continues well beyond the point of sale.
“We’re always refining the system, making it more efficient, more intelligent,” Fowler says. “It doesn’t stay the same.”
That approach has not gone unnoticed by users.
“I had a customer tell me it was like his Tesla,” Fowler says. “It just keeps improving.”
Beyond festivals
Although Totem was built for music festivals, its adoption expanded into unexpected areas.
Fowler describes a steady stream of customer stories that reveal how the device is being used in the real world – often in ways the company did not initially anticipate.
“There’s one story from a ski patrol team in Colorado using it to coordinate on the mountain,” he says. “That’s a completely different environment, but the problem is the same: how do you find each other quickly when there’s no reliable signal?”
Other stories carry more emotional weight.
“We had a call with a blind father who took it to Disney,” Fowler says. “He described being able to split off from his family and go into a store on his own – something he’d never experienced before. At one point, he even left his phone behind, and his family was still able to find him.”
For Fowler, those moments underscore a broader implication.
“There’s a lot of isolation in the blind and low-vision community, because it’s harder to share physical experiences,” he says. “What we’re seeing is that this can give people a level of independence that they didn’t have before.”
Parents have found similar value.
“One of our customers sent us a video of her 4-year-old using the Totem to find her grandfather at a festival,” Fowler says. “There are other ways to track a child, but the child isn’t doing anything. They’re just being tracked. This is different. The kid has agency. She’s actually navigating the environment herself.”
The device’s SOS feature has also proven critical in emergency situations, allowing users to discreetly signal for help and guide their friends to their location.
“I actually used it myself at Bonnaroo,” Fowler says. “I injured my knee and couldn’t move. There was no service. I hit the SOS button, and my friends came to me. That’s when it really hits you – this can matter in a serious way.”
Building an offline future
Today, Totem employs a small but intensely focused team based entirely in Chattanooga. None of its employees are originally from the city, but all have relocated there, drawn in part by the company’s rapid growth and in part by what Fowler describes as “a little slice of heaven.”
In just over two years, the company has reached profitability – an uncommon milestone for a hardware startup – and is growing at a pace that Fowler describes as “nearly tripling each year.”
But the founders see the current product as only the beginning.
Later this year, Totem plans to release the Totem Beacon, a device that functions as a mobile waypoint and introduces a new layer to the company’s technology: self-sustaining power.
“It will be able to charge itself using solar technology – even indoors or under moonlight,” Fowler says. “It doesn’t rely on any networks to communicate, and it doesn’t even need the grid to power itself. Everything it needs, it provides itself.”
Future iterations aim to expand the system’s capabilities further, incorporating voice, text and potentially video communication – all without requiring traditional connectivity.
“The long-term vision is to build a global offline network,” Fowler says. “Something that works anywhere, anytime, without depending on centralized infrastructure.”
That vision reflects a broader philosophical stance that runs through the company’s messaging and product design.
“We want people to be more present in the real world, especially during the moments that matter most,” Fowler says. “We had a customer at Coachella who told us that by the third day, they didn’t even bring their phone into the festival. They didn’t feel like they needed it.”
In an era defined by constant connectivity, that approach runs against prevailing norms. For Totem, that contrast is part of the appeal.
“The world is getting more complex,” Fowler says. “There are more systems, more layers, more dependencies. What we’re trying to do is simplify. Strip it back to something fundamental.”
The moment that matters
At its core, Totem’s appeal is rooted in something both simple and familiar, with every use of the device following the same basic arc of separation, search and reunion.
“There’s a story built into it every time someone uses it,” Fowler says. “You lose someone, you follow the light, and then you find them. That moment – when you see them again – is the whole thing.”
In a crowded festival, on a mountain slope, in a theme park or in a city without power, that moment can feel surprisingly profound.
The device provides direction, but its impact reaches further than navigation. It closes the distance between people in environments where that distance can become overwhelming.
Totem’s technology may be new, but the instinct it serves is ageless: to find your way back to the people who matter most.