StartupCentral

Last week Bangalore-based VoIP startup TringMe launched a new company, Agilte, which is developing products to address the global LTE market (LTE or 3GPP Long Term Evolution refers to post-3G, all-IP mobile network technologies). Agilte launched a ready-to-use 3GPP-compliant LTE UE (user equipment) protocol stack at the Nasscom Emerge Conclave on June 7. TringMe founder and CEO Yusuf Motiwala, a telecom technologist who earlier worked over a decade at Aricent, Lucent Technologies and Texas Instruments, spoke to Startupcentral about the Agilte experiment. Excerpts:

How did Agilte come about?

Agilte actually started as a project that another team of engineers were working on. They came to us for guidance. Initially our involvement was just in terms of helping them to get going. In a couple of months the project progressed very well and we started to take on a more active role. But since TringMe is purely into voice and this was a completely different product, we decided to create a separate company under the TringMe group.

What does the Agilte product do?

All telecom networks will eventually have to move to LTE. This is potentially a huge market. The Agilte stack comes with everything that you need to make your mobile phone or any telecom device LTE-enabled. Globally there are very few companies in this area. And ours is the only product that has passed third-party compliance tests (Agilte has passed over 182 3GPP test specification results as on May 2011).

How will the company make money? What kind of feedback are you getting from the market?

This is a B2B (business-to-business) play. We will license out the whole source code. Revenues will come either through a one-time license fee or from a combination of the one-time license fee plus royalty per phone equipment (the number of phone equipment to be sold). We just released the product last week at the Nasscom Emerge Conclave in Chennai. We have been working in stealth mode with two US-based vendors and the feedback so far has been good. Hopefully we will be able to announce our first two customers in a couple of months.

Will you look at raising external funding for the company?

At the moment the business does not need external funding. TringMe is doing well enough to sustain it. One of the primary cost heads is independent verification and testing. The other large cost head for a company like this is usually marketing. That is one of the big hurdles for new startups in India. Fortunately, for Agilte, the TringMe network — our platform is used by 120 companies — takes care of that aspect.

What’s the update on TringMe?

We’re doing well. We have over 11 million users now and recently opened up our ninth data center in Phoenix, Arizona. We’re handling around 42 million calls a month. In the last 12 months we’ve grown about 200 per cent and that should continue to be the pace in the next 12 months as well.

Any new products coming up?

Can’t give out details but we’ll be ready with a couple of cool products in another two months.

Image Courtesy: TringMe

The Tata NEN Hottest Startups 2008 contest has whipped up a minor storm because it is allegedly “forcibly nominating startups”. Yusuf Motiwala, founder and CEO of Bangalore-based VoIP startup TringME, blogs that the company has turned up on the list of nominees despite emailing in a specific request to “withdraw” its nomination. Here’s an excerpt from his post on why TringMe did not want to participate in the contest in first place:

“It’s really very simple.  NEN-HS is a contest and hence by definition every company that participates – having spent quality time filling up the detailed forms – needs to be given the same shot and fair treatment by the organizers.  In other words, the playing field needs to be leveled before the innings begin.  However, NEN has conveniently positioned few startups in the beginning and after few days of voting, they started introducing other startups into the race.  This is a completely unacceptable way of running the contest.  It’s like giving one set of racers a benefit of starting early in a 400m race. How can this be fair and just?”

This is the second instance of the contest’s nomination process being in the news for the wrong reasons. Earlier this month, Pluggd.in, a technology startup review website based in Bangalore, alleged that NEN  had used the website’s name  to nominate startups without its prior permission — see Pluggd.in’s post on the incident.

I wrote earlier that contests that rank startups and that too via a public voting system are fundamentally flawed — read post here. A few more such incidents and Tata NEN Hottest Startups will the most rocking startup ranking contest ever in terms of publicity.