[The Turning Point] Apartment management startup MyGate was started to solve security problems faced by households

Vijay Arisetty was a pilot in the Indian Air Force for a decade till 2010 and was used to certain security standards at the cantonment where he lived. Later, when he moved to a gated community in Bengaluru, he was surprised to find the inadequate levels of security and overall community management.

He found it worrisome that security guards were unable to independently verify most visitors. Even residents were uninterested in answering their intercom and communicating with guards.

“It was a real-world problem where information asymmetry and disconnected systems were inconveniencing people multiple times a day. This is when I started to think of building a technology solution that can solve this problem at scale,” says Vijay.

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Vijay was joined by Shreyans Daga, his friend from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, and Abhishek Kumar, his colleague at Goldman Sachs.

After a lot of research, they started talking to security guards, committee members, friends and families living in communities across the country.

“This helped us understand the terrain and the number of problems we could eventually solve. Then, as all entrepreneurs need to do, we began to identify which problems we would solve first. Our initial understanding of the problem has really guided us to build the right solutions,” Vijay added.

This eventually lead to the start of MyGatein 2015. The startup was founded to make housing societies safer, more convenient, and better managed.

MyGate has a single app for residents of housing societies from where they can approve or deny entry to visitors to their home, find daily help, pay their maintenance bills, book amenities, enhance child security, connect with neighbours, raise an emergency SOS, and much more.

The app also connects society residents with security guards and management committees for a secure and seamless functioning of the society.

“As ecommerce was really exploding around 2016, the footfall at the gate increased significantly, thereby leading to a higher number of strangers and, in turn, potential security threats. It had become impossible for guards to manage the traffic. Therefore, the initial idea was to help gated communities better manage their visitors. Immediately after, we came up with a number of innovative features for the gate,” says Vijay.

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After solving security problems for residential societies, the team then started building for other stakeholders such as a helpdesk system for facility managers and a full-fledged payments and accounting solution for societies. Today, the startup claims to be a comprehensive community management solution.

MyGate solutions are claimed to have been used by over two million homes in over 12,000 housing societies across 100+ major Indian cities now. According to the startup, every minute of every day, over 1,500 visitors are verified using its systems. The startup is backed by top investors including Tencent, Tiger Global Management, and Prime Venture Partners.