BENGALURU: What does one look for when finding a house? Basic amenities and security. Keeping in mind one of the prime necessities of a resident, Bengaluru-based MyGate, a community management company, designed their product to cater to the security needs of gated communities. Vijay Arisetty, the founder of the company, a former pilot at the National Defence Academy, understood the need for better security as colonies and gated communities grew.
“The prime concern of security guards at gated communities which house hundreds of families is who they are sending in and how safe it is to do so. We found that they were burdened by the sheer numbers and found a gap in technology to make that job easier,” says Vijay, who hails from Hyderabad.
Founded in 2016, the company stuck to research for a year before that. Arisetty shares, “We needed to know how security guards functioned to know what it is that they need before we started designing a product to solve it. I live in Ramki Towers in Hyderabad and for a month I played a security guard to understand what obstacles they encounter.”
After finding the pain points involved in managing security in such communities, it was time to design a product. “Security guards may not be tech-savvy and in our research we found that they function with the basic knowledge of the numbers 0 through 9. That’s how they associate people with the flats they live in. So we designed a product that made it as simple as the digits 0 to 9,” says the former pilot.
Their device supported by the app enables security personnel to type in the numerical ID codes of the regulars (like house help, milkmen etc), residents, maintenance and repairmen and visitors to the community. With these codes they can connect with the resident of a given house number directly through the app who will allow or deny entry. The residents too have an app that enables them to see people belonging to the community in categories of house help, maintenance personnel etc. Making it easy for them to find them when need be. The management of the community too has a dashboard which records the entries and time into the community for security purposes.
The product was funded and launches with the investment of `16 crore in its first round of external funding led by Prime Venture Partners. It later also raised $8.8 million in a Series A funding. The app is in place at 400 locations in Hyderabad and has its footprint in nine cities including Bengaluru, Pune, Cochin, Ahmedabad and Kolkata. The company aims to secure 10,000 gated communities and 2.5 million homes by the end of year. The mission of MyGate is, “to make security affordable to every household in India,” says Arisetty.
In a nutshell
● MyGate was founded in 2016 by Vijay Arisetty
● They were funded by Prime Venture Partners for `16 crore for launch
● They raised $8.8 million in a Series A funding later
● The app is located in nine cities and serves over 2,500 communities