[Startup Bharat] This information management and collaboration app aims to simplify your working day

The pandemic forced almost every company and office online, creating use cases for numerous businesses. Among them is Vadodara-based SocioRAC, which has created multipurpose collaboration app HyLyt to help streamline ops for working professionals and companies.

HyLyt was launched in February 2020, right before coronavirus changed the way we worked and lived.

“That came as a huge challenge for business, but only to make a better use case for our product, '' says Rajat Singhania, 52, Founder of SocioRAC.

HyLyt is a patented unified information management and collaboration platform that can be used by individuals and enterprises. It operates on top of the user’s current apps to “help them manage important information at one place to take better decisions while saving time and having better control”.

Rajat says the app brings six products — video conferencing, note taking, calendar, to-do list, file sharing, and collaboration — together along with a unique tool to offer a “Google-type search of your own data”.

He adds that the app helps to save data from anywhere instantly, structure and recall it with ease, and collaborate with teams remotely while protecting intellectual property.

ALSO READ

Why Unified Communications are the way to go to keep communication streamlined in your company

Managing information easily

The founder points out that people spend a lot of time searching, saving, and managing their information sitting at different places.

“Email clients, IM platforms, cloud storage, calendars, browsers – they all do a very good job as independent platforms but make it very difficult for the user to manage business-critical and relevant information spread across multiple places. There are no options to interlink them and the challenge is how to control the user rights for this info,” he says.

This is where HyLyt steps in, gathering and sifting through all information buried in your silos at a single glace across multiple devices.

HyLyt has received a patent from the US and is patent-pending in India; a trademark has been granted and the code has been copyrighted. It has also received ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certifications.

Rajat has bootstrapped the 12-member startup but plans to raise money this year to expand the team, product, and eye global expansion.

Getting started

Delhi boy Rajat studied at St Columba’s School, and secured a bachelor’s of commerce degree from Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC). He started using computers in 1984 at school and went on to win an award for creating an accounting program.

After graduation, he went to the US in the early 90s for a master’s course but dropped out as his mother was unwell.

His family did not have a business background, but Rajat knew he had an acumen for entrepreneurship . He started some traditional businesses, ranging from cement to tech, and shifted to Gujarat for the cement business 20 years ago.

A couple of years later, a personal pain point became a turning point – and resulted in HyLyt.

Rajat was attending a convention in 2016 when an important bit of information popped up on his mobile screen. He swiped, thinking he would return to it later.

“In office the next day, I tried to find it but couldn’t. It got lost in the glut of information. In hindsight, I thought something could have been done about it, and — as an entrepreneur — I decided not to waste a problem,” he says.

His research showed that the problem of plenty when it comes to data makes management a huge challenge. The ability to pull, save, and interlink non-structured business and individual data sitting in multiple silos and manage rights of this information, for better security and privacy, are key problems.

Rajat looked for solutions but didn’t find anything in the market. He put together a team and started building a solution in 2017.

HyLyt was born as a side project, but the product received recognition from TiE as one of the top products that year while in its pilot phase. Soon, Rajat stepped down from all his companies and started focusing full time on SocioARC.

Competition and the future

SocioRAC is offering a B2B SaaS product for businesses, and charges on a per user, per year basis. As of now, the consumer app is free, but it will cost around Rs 3,000 or so per year in the near future.

According to Markets and Market, the market size for enterprise content management was $35 billion two years ago, growing at a CAGR of 17 percent, and video conference was $8 billion two years ago, growing at 9 percent.

The total market size SocioRAC addresses based on two- year-old estimates is $44 billion, and is estimated to grow to $110 billion by 2026, as per Global Market Insights. Zion Market research estimates just the content management market to reach $120 billion by then.

The pandemic slowed down user acquisition and the company is now working with six clients. However, the pipeline for the next 12-18 months “looks promising with clients across the globe”.

HyLyt completes with biggies like Microsoft Teams and Slack for business collaboration solutions, Evernote and other note-taking apps for task management, and video conferencing tools for video calls. However, the differentiator is that HyLyt adds more value in terms of “not competing with any of these platforms, but making the data on these platforms more valuable for users”.

Speaking of investments, Rajat, without sharing financial details, says the team has invested “three years of time, money and sweat” to get the product ready for the market.

“I have been able to sustain and get it till here using a significant part of my life’s savings and help from some friends and family.”

The company is now looking at product partnerships and strategic investors to help to acquire clients, and expand and market the product.

Rajat says the mission is to be the go-to product for people when they think about information management.

“Most products work vertically, but we are working horizontally – this is our USP. We have a powerful roadmap and plan to add AI, location, and voice-based functions to make the product even more useful and powerful for users,” Rajat says.