Live video and audio calling platform Dyte on Friday announced that they have raised $11.6 million in seed funding from Unbound, Sequoia Capital India’s Surge and Nexus Venture Partners. The funding will be utilised by the company to expand their product, engineering team and focus on international hires while building for a global market.
Dyte launched its beta version in February 2021 with the final product released to the public in May 2021 by Abhishek Kankani, Kushagra Vaish and Palash Golecha. All three graduated with degrees in Computer Science from VIT Vellore.
Varied features
Dyte is a real-time audio and video communication software development kit (SDK). It allows product and engineering teams to integrate live video into their apps. The SDK offers integrations within hours, and has a host of plug-ins and configurations to embed audio and video calling, AI video augmentation, and collaboration features.
Dyte offers plugins including whiteboarding apps such as Miro and Whiteboard, along with Youtube and Google docs. It also provides a remote browser, which allows multiple users to browse the web in sync while on a video call.
“We’ve only just scratched the surface of possibilities when it comes to live video. It’s our mission to provide app developers with an easy-to-use interface, so that they can focus on the customer user experience, and not worry about the technology or infrastructure challenges of building and supporting live audio and video,” said Kankani, Co-Founder and CEO of Dyte.
‘Massive growth’
“Using live video and audio for work is not only the new normal, but it’s imperative that the future of work is built out and thought out carefully. People need to be able to multitask, share and integrate their business needs while being able to talk with colleagues and clients,” Kankani added. “Since we launched Dyte in March 2021, we’ve seen massive scale with 30x growth in terms of users and 25x growth in terms of usage minutes on the platform,” he said.
A few of Dyte’s current customers include Skill-Lync, Yellow.ai (Yellow Messenger), Coffeemug.ai, Shimmer, Newton School, Board Infinity, Zuddl, ADPList and Crater.club. Dyte also caters to telemedicine apps, edtech and gaming platforms, and customer-support teams.
It’s pricing is based on user minutes — calculated as the number of users on a video call multiplied by the number of minutes each user was on the call. The company has been logging “millions of minutes” of live video usage across clients in the US, Southeast Asia and India, it said.