In 2015, Gautam BT was in his second stint at Flipkart, as the ecommerce platform was reinventing itself for the smartphone era. The demand for Android handsets was growing fast across price points. And Flipkart wanted to be the leading ecommerce app in India, with Amazon on its heels.

As part of the mobile-web team in Flipkart, Gautam came across a plethora of software like Firebase for developers to build and augment mobile applications. But, it isn’t quite the case for developers working on Internet of Things (IoT) applications, he asserts.

Bytebeam, founded by Gautam, Ravi Teja K, and Bharadwaaj Ramakrishnan in 2019, wants to plug that gap, as more original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) design and develop their devices as IoT applications.

Applications can range from electric vehicles, wearables, and kitchen appliances, to smart containers of logistics and warehousing companies, and drones.

“The hardware ecosystem is still coming up in India, and is at the stage that mobile apps were in 2008,” says Gautam, Co-founder and CEO of Bytebeam. “A lot of companies are trying a lot of things.”

In this emerging context, Bytebeam is evolving as a backend platform for product managers and developers in OEMs to build and augment their smart devices. It wants to be the cloud backend for IoT applications.

Backend Platform as a Service

The opportunity exists because of the nature of IoT, which refers to a system of interoperable computing devices, mechanical and digital machines with the capability to transfer data over a network.

Most of the cloud infrastructure platforms cater to software applications, whereas IoT requires a lot of engineering on the hardware side because of the mechanical aspects of IoT.

Between 2015 and 2018, the Bytebeam founders experienced the problem first-hand when they were developing connectivity features and smart solutions at Ather Energy, a pioneering electric two-wheeler company from India.

“The existing infrastructure solutions that existed were not made for IoT use cases,” says Achal Kothari, Head of Business at Bytebeam, who has also worked closely with Ather Energy. “We had to either retro-fit existing solutions or tools I was familiar with, or build solutions on our own,” Gautam adds.

To be sure, there is now a growing tribe of IoT application developer platforms, such as Ayla Networks in the US, Tuya in China, apart from Sibros for the auto industry, and Memfault, a cloud-based platform to debug, monitor, and update connected devices remotely.

The global market for smart home devices grew 11.7 percent in 2021 over the previous year, with more than 895 million devices shipped, according to International Data Corporation (IDC), a market intelligence and technology advisory firm.

IDC found networked video-entertainment devices (smart TVs, streaming sticks, and smart set-top boxes) to be the largest contributor of shipments, accounting for nearly 35 percent in 2021, and growing 4.8 percent over 2020. Smart lighting devices are forecast to be the fastest-growing category of devices with a five-year compound annual growth rate of 23.6 percent, it added.

Bytebeam pegs its market opportunity to be $14 billion in size, and wants to begin by focusing on the Indian market. All its customers have operations in India. “We want …….

Source: https://yourstory.com/2022/06/bytebeam-building-cloud-infra-smart-devices/amp