Checkpoint

MyGate’s easy-to-use app gives gated colonies a way to keep track of entries and exits, improving security.

- Rukmini Rao

CIVILIAN LIFE gave Vijay Arisetty, CEO of MyGate, his start-up idea. After a medical condition forced Arisetty to leave the Indian Air Force – where he was a helicopter pilot and had even won a Shaurya Chakra in 2004, when he rescued over 300 tsunami victims in Andaman and Nicobar Islands – he worked with Goldman Sachs before becoming an entrepreneur.

When Arisetty started living in a high-rise block in Bengaluru, he observed that many strangers came to people’s houses for home deliveries and that many households had high dependency on house helps. Neither the residents nor the security guards at the building had any real-time knowledge of visitors’ whereabouts. With rising gated communities, booming e-commerce and hyper-local delivery services, and an increased floating population in Bengaluru, Arisetty spotted an opportunity and shared the idea with his friend Abhishek Kumar. The two approached their friends Shreyans Daga and Vivaik Bharadwaaj, an Internet security expert. They got together to set up MyGate.

“We found a sweet spot: security. People like to feel safe. In India, most sectors had gone through technology change, but a need as basic as security was yet to see this. That’s how we built MyGate,” says Arisetty.