Internet of Things (IoT) in India is still getting adopted at a good rate at around 35% increase per year. There was about $5 billion invested in the IoT space in 2019, and $15 billion is expected to be invested in 2021. With Covid-19, IoT, along with cloud technology, will enable interesting use cases to serve the post-Covid world. 

Many enterprises are moving their systems like HRMS, ERP etc. to cloud-based platforms. There is a wave of other cloud platforms coming in where all traditional systems like access control, video surveillance etc. will also move to the cloud in the coming years.

With a similar vision, Goa-based Spintly has been rigorously working towards providing businesses access to touchless and contactless technologies, enabling the organisations to excel in the post-COVID-19 world.

In March 2020, the company received seed funding from Saltwater Venture Sparks and angels for $ 250,000. The company currently has an order pipeline of about 1.5Cr and a user onboarding visibility of over 20,000 users in the coming months.

Founded by Malcolm Dsouza and Rohin Parkar in 2017, Spintly is one of the world’s first truly wireless, BLE-mesh powered smart access control platforms. The startup focuses on providing hassle-free, touch-less, mobile-based access control and attendance management solutions for enterprise, hospitality and residential applications.

Flagship Products

SMACC UNO (Smart Access UNO) is one of the flagship products which gets installed on each of the doors which require access control. The readers can communicate with each other over a wireless mesh network powered by Bluetooth Mesh. Users are granted access to the doors bypassing a digital key from the cloud to their smartphones. Also, users can unlock doors with their smartphones and the access logs, and history is captured in real-time.

How Is It Different From Other Products In The Market?

To this, Dsouza stated, “We have created the world’s first BLE-mesh enabled access control platform which not only allows users to unlock doors with their smartphone but also eliminates the wired infrastructure needed for access control deployments. And that’s what makes us apart from the rest of the competitors.”

Use of IoT & AI @ Spintly

According to Parkar, Spintly uses IoT as the primary enabler for the access control platform. The company uses the Bluetooth signal from the readers to form an IoT mesh network of devices to send data to the cloud. The kay part of the network is the Spintly Mesh gateway. This gateway connects to the IoT Network of readers on one side and connects to the cloud on the other side.

The gateway communicates with the Spintly IoT cloud engine, which is built on AWS (Amazon web services). The company also uses advanced machine learning techniques to analyse occupancy patterns and provide useful insight to the customers to help them improve workforce and workplace efficiency.  

Core Tech Stack

Spintly has developed custom hardware which makes the BLE-mesh network robust and allows the system to work through walls and across floors. Firmware id the piece of code which resides in the hardware and is the brains of the hardware. A Bluetooth Mesh firmware has also been developed, which allows seamless communication between various nodes. 

The gateway is built on a Linux platform, and it uses Bluetooth Low energy to communicate with all the devices and uses Wifi or LAN to communicate with the cloud. It uses MQTT and HTTPS protocol to communicate with the cloud. Also, the cloud platform consists of the IoT engine built on the AWS platform and the API interface, which allows the exchange of data with other applications. 

Tackling Hiring Phase

According to Dsouza, the company has primarily hired engineers straight out of college and developed talent over the last 2-3 years. He said, “We had to do this as the kind of skills we needed were completely missing in India. That still remains our primary mode of hiring. We do see a shortage of experienced talent in the software development space in Goa which we need to scale up our software platform and are looking for experienced talent to join us in other parts of the country especially in Bangalore. But when it comes to hiring other than primary technical skills, we look for attitude and the hunger to learn.”

Future Roadmap

“The future roadmap looks clear and luminous for us since it focuses on simplifying and bringing a great level of convenience to users. Currently, we have a presence in two countries, namely India and the USA. In India, our focus has been on the south and north Indian market, and we are looking to expand our operation throughout the Indian market. Similarly, for the US market, we have started serving in the North American market and looking to capture the entire US market in the next five years. Also, we have been seeing some positive responses coming for the Middle East countries,” said Parkar on a concluding note.