You don’t have to start from scratch if you want to include video or audio calls into your product. If your budget allows, there are SDKs that can help with much of the heavy work unless you have some really unique requirements. Dyte, a software development kit, said last week that it had secured $11.6 million in a seed round. Dyte bills itself as the “most developer-friendly” solution, emphasizing a few key features: quick connection, easy but flexible customization, and real-time interactive plugins for expansion.
That final section appears to be very interesting. They’ve created a secondary SDK in addition to the video/audio calling SDK for creating interactive experiences on top of such calls. They demonstrated a shared web browser, a collaborative whiteboard, rudimentary turn-based games, and a built-in file viewer where one person may converse as another navigates slides (without either needing to share their screen – simply upload the slideshow file itself). Because these Javascript-based plugins have access to metadata such as each user’s role, you might, for example, limit who can operate the file viewer or create a game where the call host sees stuff the players don’t.
Dyte has a lot of the features you’d expect from a video chatting platform, such as several view layouts, chat and polls, screensharing, backdrop removal/swapping tools, and so on. They’ve made customisation as straightforward as possible behind the scenes. In a video conversation with Dyte co-founder Abhishek Kankani (hosted on Dyte, of course), Kankani had a TechCrunch-themed chat interface up and running in only a few minutes (complete with TC branding and lots of green). This same customizer allowed him to decide which of the aforementioned plugins were shown to users, adjust the general interface’s appearance and which features were visible, and manage user roles.
Because the co-founders are lifetime developers, Kankani says they created everything with developers in mind. The company prides itself on its documentation and “Ultra Rapid” implementation. “Haven’t we been coding for a long time?” Kankani asks. “I’ve been programming since I was in fifth grade.” My other co-founders… probably [much] longer. As a result, we understand the difficulties you confront as a developer while using a product, and we created one that we would like to use.”
Dyte charges per user, per month, based on the number of minutes a team uses, with the first 10,000 minutes each month being free. Optional features such as allowing users to record conversations to the cloud or broadcasting calls to other platforms through RTMP (think live event broadcasting) raise the price. According to Kankani, Unbound, Surge (Sequoia Capital India’s early-stage program), Nexus Venture Partners, and a few angel investors, including Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover and Postman founder Abhinav Asthana, participated in this round.
