SaaS start-up Oloid raises $12mn in funding for product, tech talent

The Series A funding brings Oloid's total raised since inception to $17 mn. It will be used to help expand Oloid's retrofit access control products portfolio and teams in Bangalore and Silicon Valley

SaaS player Oloid said on Wednesday it raised $12 million in a funding round led by Dell Technologies Capital with participation from Honeywell Ventures, Okta Ventures and other previous investors.

The Series A funding brings Oloid’s total raised since inception to $17 million. It will be used to help expand Oloid’s retrofit access control products portfolio and teams in Bangalore and Silicon Valley.

Oloid intends to use the fresh funds to enhance its products and to pool in tech talent in India. The objective is to double their workforce. The company is currently running a Beta program of its self-install product wherein the retrofit upgrades are being offered at no cost. The startup had raised its seed round of $5 Million, in August 2019 from Emergent Ventures and Jyoti Bansal, Co-Founder and Entrepreneurial Partner at Unusual Ventures.

“Oloid is accelerating the adoption of mobile access by introducing an easy, self-install SaaS model that avoids the cost and resource constraints that traditionally plague the physical access control market,” said Mohit Garg, Co-founder and CEO of Oloid. “This round of financing will enable us to extend the compatibility of our product with a wider range of badge readers and access control systems and build direct and indirect sales channels across the nation.”

An Oloid survey of more than 100 large employers revealed that 58% are ready to adopt mobile access but find the cost and installation experience of current solutions to be prohibitive. Oloid solves this challenge with a mobile access product that enables organizations to grant badgeless access to existing doors and turnstiles to hundreds and thousands of employees with the click of a button. Once retrofited with Oloid, companies can integrate physical access with other IT systems such as employee records, onboarding and offboarding workflows, domain login, desk reservation and employee health databases for verifying vaccination & immunity status.

“Oloid’s innovation has the potential to transform the hardware-centric access control industry into a Software-as-a-Service model with minimal capital expenditure,” said Gregg Adkin, managing director at Dell Technologies Capital. “With the movement towards hybrid work and hot desking, employers are reevaluating many aspects of the physical workplace. Seamless access control will be an important part of this shift and Oloidcan take away a big part of the costs and heavy lifting of ripping and replacing existing systems and hardware.”

“Honeywell is focused on improving the occupant experience – this includes eliminating friction in a building while maintaining security fidelity of access points,” said Patrick Hogan, managing director of Honeywell Ventures. “We look forward to working with Oloid to develop next-generation physical access and digital identity solutions to offer customers cost-effective and easy-to-deploy upgrades.”