Bytebeam has just secured $3 million in its seed round. The SaaS startup was launched in 2019 and has signed up 10 businesses.
Gautam BT was doing his second stint at Flipkart In 2015, as the ecommerce platform was turning around itself for the era of smartphones. The demand for Android smartphones was rapidly growing across price points. And Flipkart wanted to become India’s leading ecommerce, followed by Amazon.
Gautam, who was a member of Flipkart’s mobile-web team, came across a lat range of software such as Firebase for developers to develop and augment wireless applications. However, Gautam asserts it isn’t quite the case for developers working on Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
Established by Gautam, Ravi Teja K, and Bharadwaaj Ramakrishnan in 2019, Bytebeam, is looking to plug that gap, with more original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) designing and developing their devices as IoT applications.
Applications can vary from electric vehicles, kitchen appliances, and wearables, to smart containers of logistics and warehousing firms, and drones.
Co-founder and CEO of Bytebeam, Gautam, says, “The hardware ecosystem continues to come up in India, and has entered the phase where mobile apps were in 2008.”
Bytebeam is in this emerging context, gradually becoming a backend platform for product managers and developers in OEMs to develop and augment their smart gadgets. It is looking to be the cloud backend for IoT apps.
The opportunity exists due to he nature of IoT, which refers to a system of interoperable computing gadgets, mechanical and digital machines that can transfer data over a network.
Although most of the cloud infrastructure platforms cater to software applications, IoT needs a lot of engineering on the hardware side due to IoT’s mechanical aspects.
The founders of Bytebeam experienced the problem first-hand, between 2015 and 2018, when they were building connectivity features and smart solutions atIndia’s pioneering electric two-wheeler firm, Ather Energy.
Head of Business at Bytebeam, who has also collaborated with Ather Energy, Achal Kothar, says, “The current infrastructure solutions that were present were not developed for IoT use cases.” Gautam says Bytebeamhad to either retro-fit current solutions or tools I was acquainted with, or develop solutions on its own. To be sure, there is now an expanding tribe of IoT application developer platforms, like Ayla Networks in the US, Tuya in China, besides Sibros for the auto sector, and Memfault, a cloud-based platform for debugging, monitoring, and updating connected devices remotely.
The world market for smart home devices expanded 11.7 percent in 2021 over 2020 as over 895 million devices were shipped. That is what market intelligence and technology advisory company, International Data Corporation (IDC) says.
In May, Bytebeam secured $3 million in its seed funding round from Together fund, Strive VC, and Accel. The round had the participation of dvantEdge VC; Co-founder of Hasura, Tanmai Gopal; Phanindra Sama, Co-founder of Redbus, and others.
