Bytebeam, an Accel Atoms cohort company, raises $3 million in their seed round!

We take great pleasure in congratulating the Bytebeam team for raising $3 million in their seed funding round. The funding was raised from Together fund, Accel and Strive VC. The round also saw participation from AdvantEdge VC backed by Motherson Group, Phanindra Sama, Founder of Redbus, Tanmai Gopal, Co-founder of Hasura, Vimal Kumar Founder of Juspay, Mekin Maheshwari, Ex CPO at Flipkart, Deepak Anchala Founder of Slintel, Aakrit Vaish Co-Founder of Haptik and many other marquee  angel investors.

What is Bytebeam?

From their experience at Ather Energy, Gautam, Ravi & Bharadwaaj identified that building and scaling the backends for IoT products is way more complex, compared to that of mobile or web applications.  So, aiming to build a one-stop backend solution for a company’s IoT products, Gautam BT, Bharadwaaj Ramakrishnan and Raviteja K co-founded Bytebeam in 2019.

Almost every IoT project needs multiple integrations, in terms of components. More often than not, these components don’t seem to match IoT use cases and thus, it takes longer for companies to implement, scale, maintain and secure their IoT products. Bytebeam was formed with the sole objective to make IoT product development easy for companies to handle. This can help teams invest more time on the core product, instead of worrying about building an in-house data engineering team.

Their “smart as a service” cloud platform enables companies to set up a backend for their IoT products, hassle-free and quick. Bytebeam’s customizable dashboard gives users a company-wide visibility into data analytics, device to mobile communication, and over-the-air updates. Moreover, it allows companies the power to manage everything in one place and leverage all the benefits that IoT offers.  This cost-effective platform is also built with security at its core with data encryption at device level. By allowing users to have role-based access control, unauthorized data access can be prevented, thus ensuring privacy.  .

Bytebeam today!

Bytebeam was selected to the first cohort of Accel Atoms in 2021 through which they also  received an  initial grant of $250K as a non-dilutive fund. Since then, the team has  acquired users from the Indian mobility space like battery, EV’s, charging infra and more. Companies like Exponent Energy, Matter Motor Works and Micelio Motors are a part of their client base.

The co-founders emphasized,

“The smart hardware i.e. the IoT ecosystem is developing on a similar trend as the mobile tech ecosystem expanded in 2008. We anticipate a similar or even a higher growth trajectory in smart hardware products over the next 10 years, the way mobile apps were built in the last 12-13 years. Overall Manufacturing will also boom with the Make in India focus fueling additional growth towards IoT.”

‍With the massive growth anticipation, the founders intend to leverage the $3M funds towards building technical expertise in the team, further evolving the cloud-based platform, creating a pan India presence and establishing a business with reach across verticals like Electric mobility, agriculture, drone tech, smart appliances and more.

Accel Atoms and the Bytebeam Story

Being techies, the problem the co-founders were trying to address was crystal clear in their minds. However, the challenge was to communicate the business needs to investors and users alike. Gautam BT, one of the co-founders of Bytebeam, emphasized that in the initial days, the Atoms program helped them fine-tune the communication of their value proposition.

Impressed by the work ethics and involvement of the partners at Accel and analysts, co-founder Gautam went on to say:

“Accel being a big firm and this being the first cohort, I expected to basically get a cheque and nothing much else. But Prayank & Siddharth spent a good amount of time with us. There were many weeks during the program when we would meet multiple times.”

‍Additionally, the founder also mentioned how he was pleasantly taken aback by the swift and hassle-free application and selection process for the Atoms program.

Speaking of one of their biggest takeaways from the pre-seed program, he said

"$250k is just enough for a company to make your first few critical hires and build an MVP. Beyond that most of the startups in the cohort had to raise more capital. Fundraising is a full time job.”

‍Apart from the initial non-dilutive capital, he appreciates how Atoms has specialized mentors who help founders ace through the fundraising process, thus ensuring that they are ahead of the game in the long run.

Apart from getting first angel cheques into the company, Bytebeam team found the three demo days to be extremely beneficial to their journey as they gained crucial feedback on their pitch.  They further added,

“India presents a 20B$ market opportunity for our offering over the next 10 years. We are excited to capture a fair share of this massive market opportunity. Having marquee investors backing us strengthens our belief in our product.”

In the words of Prayank Swaroop, partner at Accel,

“Bytebeam's vision of simplifying IoT for businesses excites us. Being part of the first cohort of Atoms, their speed of execution in developing a scalable and cost-effective platform that allows any organization to leverage IoT has been incredible. We are thrilled to partner with Bytebeam and look forward to supporting them with mentorship, networking, and providing them access to our pool of resources.”

Bytebeam is rapidly enabling organizations to extract the most out of their IoT projects. Here’s wishing Team Bytebeam all best and we cannot wait to see what lies ahead of you. Thank you for partnering and letting us be a part of your journey.