Spintly raises Rs 4.6 crore in extended seed round funding

Bengaluru: SaaS-based physical security and smart buildings start-up Spintly, has raised Rs. 4.6 crore in an extended seed round of funding. This round of investment was led by Silicon Valley-based Riso Capital, along with SucSEED Indovation Fund from Hyderabad, Chicago based Nikhand Investments LLC, and Keiretsu Forum angel network.

Spintly provides SaaS-based physical security solutions which enable frictionless smartphone-based door access, eliminating the need for key cards and elaborate wiring for access control and is one of the few start-ups in the country operating in this space. Brigade REAP, the first Proptech accelerator in the country and one of the top accelerators in the world has played a vital role in the growth of Spintly, having mentored the company.

Speaking on this development, Rohin Parkar, Co-Founder and CEO, Spintly, stated "We are extremely bullish about the future and are determined to transform the entire physical security and smart building ecosystem. We will utilise these funds to boost sales, marketing and research activities in order to enhance our position as pioneers in the wireless cloud-based access control technology space.

We offer the world's first fully wireless mesh technology for access control which can also be used for smart building applications. We are humbled at raising a round of funding during COVID19 and since then have been witnessing a steady growth in demand for contactless door access solutions. This is certainly an indication of trust from our customers and investors".

Commenting on the investment, Sri Purisai, Founder and Partner, Riso Capital said "RiSo Capital is excited to be part of Spintly's journey as they continue to scale and deploy a flexible SaaS model to access control and building automation markets. Spintly brings an enterprise grade Access Control as a Service (ACaaS) stack offering to a growing building automation market. The stack is versatile to run on various hardware topologies including Bluetooth mesh and other native IP protocols. We support the team's vision and are confident in their ability to execute and deliver."

"Security and RegTech is one of the six focus areas of SucSEED Indovation Fund and we found Spintly's tech solution quite fitting to the growing segment of Smart buildings and Smart living. Collaboration with supporting ecosystem could be key in their growth strategy, which we feel we can help them with." Said Vikrant Varshney, Managing Partner of SucSEED Indovation Fund.

Nirupa Shankar, Director, Brigade REAP, commented, "At Brigade REAP, our focus has always been to choose and mentor start-ups that can make a difference to real-world issues. We strongly believe that Spintly has immense potential and given the huge opportunity that lies ahead of them, are sure to grow even more. We are proud to have been associated with them as mentors. Today Spintly is very well positioned to capitalize on this growth trend with their cloud-based SaaS platform."

Srikanth Rajan from Keiretsu forum Chennai said, "Touchless authentication and access control is a big need of the post-Covid world. Spintly's technology has applicability across all geographic markets, and in several verticals with additional potential from a future data play. We are co-investing in Spintly along with RiSo Capital because we believe that between RiSo's footprint in the US and ours in India, we can help Spintly rapidly grow its success in global markets."

Spintly was founded by Rohin Parkar and Malcolm Dsouza in late 2017. Both worked in the US in the wireless technology space before returning to India in 2017. They started Spintly with a goal of building technology-based products in India. The world is moving towards a keyless future where one will no longer carry a key around to unlock doors. It will be done using one of our personal devices such as a smartphone or a smartwatch as a key. The Spintly platform is built to accelerate the transition to this keyless future. Spintly believes that their Access Control as a Service (ACaaS) platform has a huge potential to enable use cases in smart buildings, as smart buildings move towards wireless infrastructure.

Spintly represents a breed of Indian start-ups which focus on deep-tech and have a potential to disrupt global ecosystems. The Access Control market is currently a $70B market expected to reach $84B by 2023. Out of the $70B market $42B is the SaaS component of the market which is a huge shift in this hardware centric world of physical security. As per a report from IPVM SaaS based Physical security start-ups raised a total of $300M in 2020.

Covid-19 has had a profound impact on the industry including the Spintly business. After an initial slowdown during the lockdown phase the demand for Spintly products has increased steadily due to the need for contactless solutions which can be managed and operated remotely. Spintly has been quick to cease this opportunity and has expanded rapidly. The future looks really promising for Spintly as the focus of the world has shifted away from China and towards India to deliver strong products for the global markets.