Accel Founder Stories 004: Introducing Bytebeam

The CEO and founder of Bengaluru-based Bytebeam, Gautam BT was tinkering with technology at numerous startups after having graduated from IIT Madras with a dual degree in Computer Science.

Straight out of college, he joined Flipkart and went up the ladder as a developer. Later, he also headed the software and tech architecture at Ather Energy.

Wanting to start his own business venture all along, Gautam happened to meet his co-founders Ravi Teja K and Bharadwaaj Ramakrishnan at Ather. It would be convenient to call it a mafia in itself, but that is a story for another day. But before the trio went on to start Bytebeam together 2 years ago in 2019, they were proficient enough in building the whole connectivity stack at Ather Energy. Startups were actively conversing with Gautam if he could build out something similar for them too. But he already had an intense and hectic stint at the mobility startup, and was desperately looking for a break from startups. He was looking to take a 3-year long career break.

At the same time, Ravi Teja was also looking to move out of Ather. An enthusiast of open-source and distributed systems, Ravi was trying to do something in the same space. Meanwhile, Gautam put his entrepreneurial hat on and got together with Ravi to start Bytebeam. As it happened, Bharadwaaj’s employer Grinntech where he worked last as VP of Embedded Systems was also a potential customer for Bytebeam. Soon enough, the third Cofounder had also joined the mission of simplifying cloud infrastructure for smart device manufacturers.

The plethora of devices we use everyday is only growing by manyfold, and these devices are also managing to be smarter than ever. But the cloud infrastructure needed to build smart devices is still very complex. 

Gautam says:

"Backend development overall, in a web and mobile app ecosystem, is naturally far more mature and comes with extremely good tooling. However, one cannot say the same about IoT device infrastructure and management. Building out a backend part for this space is far more complex than it needs to be.” 

The problem is that the backend ecosystem that smart device manufacturers use today is highly fragmented and there are no integrated solutions that can also be easily customized to the varied needs of device manufacturers . This is where Bytebeam comes into play. Bytebeam provides all the features a smart device manufacturer expects like over the air updates, device to mobile communication, data visualization, alerting as a single managed backend-as-a-service offering. What's more, Bytebeam provides extremely easy to get started SDK’s on the device side for Linux, Android and even low power microcontroller devices.

The trio believes the need for this kind of infrastructure is highly unmet in the market and building this will help accelerate IoT journeys for the many hardware product developers and makers out there.

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