Startup Deep Dive : MyGate — the gate-security app that earns most of its money selling ads

MyGate built its name guarding the entrance to gated communities, yet in FY25 roughly two-thirds of its money came from selling advertising to the residents living inside those gates, not from the security software bolted to the gate itself. The company that reported a statutory net loss of ₹226.4 crore in FY23 reached adjusted operating-EBITDA breakeven two years later, on operating revenue of ₹173.5 crore.

That is the tension inside Vivish Technologies Private Limited, the entity behind the app most Indian apartment dwellers know only as the screen a security guard taps when a delivery rider arrives. This is the story of how a visitor-log utility became a media and payments business, how it nearly ran out of road during the 2022-23 funding winter, and what its slow crawl back to breakeven says about building software for a market that will only pay so much.

Quick facts

What MyGate actually does

MyGate sells a community-management and security platform to India’s gated apartment complexes. The buyer is usually the resident welfare association (RWA) or management committee; the daily users are residents, security guards and the builders or facility firms that run the premises. Around this core, MyGate has stacked several revenue layers:

• Digital visitor and gate management: guards log deliveries, cabs, domestic help and guests through the app, with resident approvals sent to phones.
• Society administration SaaS: maintenance billing, accounting, notices, complaint tracking and community communication for committees.
• Payments and consumer services: online maintenance payments, utility bills, and home services booked from within the app.
• Advertising: brands reach a captive, high-income urban-housing audience inside the app.
• Smart-home and hardware: connected-home and access-control products layered onto the software, per the company’s FY25 disclosures.

The origin: a pilot, a delivery, and a locked gate

MyGate was founded in 2016 and its app went live in Bengaluru in June 2016. The founding team paired unusual backgrounds. Vijay Arisetty is a former Indian Air Force pilot and an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus, who brought the security and operations instinct. Abhishek Kumar, an IIT Kanpur graduate and former Goldman Sachs executive, handled strategy and finance. Shreyans Daga, an Oracle veteran and ISB alumnus, built the technology. Vivaik Bharadwaj completed the founding group.

The founding insight was mundane and therefore durable: the security guard at an apartment gate is the single choke-point through which every visitor, delivery and cab passes, yet that gate ran on paper registers and phone calls. Digitise the gate, and you own the most-used utility in an apartment’s daily life. The register was the wedge; everything else, from payments to advertising, was built on the traffic it created.

The struggle years: a pandemic and a purge

MyGate’s core product assumed visitors. In 2020, COVID-19 removed them. Lockdowns shut gates, banned outside help and froze the visitor-management flow that anchored the app, forcing MyGate to lean harder on payments, communication and home services just as household budgets tightened. The company kept spending to grow, and the cost base ballooned faster than revenue.

The reckoning came in the 2022-23 funding winter. In February 2023, MyGate laid off around 30% of its workforce, cutting headcount from roughly 600 to about 400, with the reductions concentrated in mid- and junior-level ground operations and community engagement roles. The financials of that period were stark:

• FY23 statutory net loss: ₹226.4 crore, a figure inflated by non-cash charges including fair-value losses on financial liabilities and ESOP costs (entrackr, reporting RoC filings).
• FY23 loss excluding those non-cash items: ₹76.43 crore, itself down 35.3% from FY22 (entrackr, August 2023).
• FY23 employee benefit expense: ₹91.34 crore, down 14.4% YoY as the cuts began to bite.

Leadership changed alongside the cost base. Co-founder and then-CEO Vijay Arisetty moved to the chairman’s role, and co-founder Abhishek Kumar, previously the operations lead, stepped up as CEO. Arisetty later went on to co-found the fintech startup Aurm.

The turning point: from ₹226 crore losses to breakeven

The single turning point was not a product launch or a funding round. It was the decision, forced by the funding winter, to stop chasing growth at any cost and drag the business to breakeven. The numbers on each side of that pivot tell the story plainly.

On one side, FY23: a statutory net loss of ₹226.4 crore and an adjusted EBITDA loss of ₹71.3 crore, on operating revenue of ₹71.1 crore. On the other side, two years of discipline. In FY24, total operating expenses fell 12.8% to ₹129.5 crore even as operating revenue grew 35% to ₹96.2 crore; the net loss shrank 82.4% to ₹39.8 crore, the adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed to ₹20.4 crore, and MyGate reported zero cash burn in the March 2024 quarter. In FY25, operating revenue jumped 80% to ₹173.5 crore, the net loss fell a further 61% to ₹15.4 crore, and the company reported adjusted operating EBITDA of ₹0.4 crore, calling it breakeven, with profit before tax of ₹7.1 crore before ESOP costs. The loss-making growth story had become a controlled-burn turnaround.

The money behind it

MyGate’s cap table is a roll-call of the funds that backed Indian consumer tech through its 2018-2021 boom. The funding shape, from reputable trackers and company statements:

• Seed, January 2018: about $2.5 million, led by Prime Venture Partners.
• Series A, October 2018: ₹65 crore, led by Prime Venture Partners (company- and tracker-stated).
• Series B, October 2019: $56 million, led by Tencent Holdings and Tiger Global Management, with JS Capital and existing investor Prime Venture Partners, per Inc42 and the company’s own announcement.
• Strategic investors added over time include ACKO and Urban Company, per Tracxn.

• Total raised: reported between roughly $79.5 million (CB Insights) and $83.3 million across about 8 rounds (StartupTalky). Trackers differ on how they count, so treat this as a range.
• Last reported valuation: roughly $194 million (PitchBook, dated November 2022) to $203 million post-money (April 2023). No fresh primary round has been confirmed since, so the current figure is unverified.

The named backers each changed something. Prime Venture Partners provided the early conviction and stayed through later rounds. Tencent and Tiger Global brought the growth capital and the ambition that funded national expansion, and later the pressure to justify it when the market turned.

How MyGate makes money

MyGate runs a classic engagement-then-monetise model: acquire societies with a low-friction security utility, build daily habit, then sell against the attention and transactions that habit creates. The money comes in through distinct streams, and the part people get wrong is which one is largest.

• Enterprise revenue (the bulk): SaaS subscriptions and services billed to RWAs, security agencies and builders, plus brand advertising sold against the resident audience. Enterprise revenue was ₹85.4 crore in FY24, up 35.1% YoY (Inc42, reporting RoC filings).
• Consumer services: commissions and fees on utility bills, maintenance payments and home services booked in-app. This was ₹10.9 crore in FY24, up about 38% YoY.
• Smart-home and hardware: connected-home and access products layered onto the platform, folded into the FY25 revenue mix.

Where the margin sits is the interesting part. Software subscriptions to cost-conscious housing societies are low-ticket and price-sensitive, so the higher-margin lever is advertising and, secondarily, transaction take rates on payments. The costs that mattered were people and ground operations, which is exactly what the 2023 cuts targeted: employee benefit expense fell to ₹66.4 crore in FY24 (excluding ESOPs) from ₹79.6 crore, and total expenses dropped to ₹129.5 crore.

The numbers

Operating revenue and statutory net loss, in ₹ crore, from RoC filings as reported by entrackr and Inc42. FY22’s statutory net loss was not cleanly separated from non-cash items in the sources opened, so it is left unlabelled rather than guessed.

The trajectory is a 4.3x rise in operating revenue from FY22 to FY25 against a loss that shrank in absolute terms every year after FY23. In FY25 the company also reported ₹7.1 crore profit before tax excluding ESOP costs, and adjusted operating EBITDA of ₹0.4 crore. Glossed once for international readers, FY25 operating revenue of ₹173.5 crore is about $18 million.

Where the money really comes from

The surprise for a company branded on security: advertising, not subscriptions, is the biggest earner. Per FY25 reporting, the revenue mix breaks down roughly as follows:

• Advertising: about 65-70% of revenue, sold against a concentrated, high-income urban-apartment audience (Inc42, FY25).
• SaaS subscriptions plus smart-home hardware: about 30-35% of revenue.
• By customer type in FY24: enterprise (RWAs, security agencies, builders) contributed ₹85.4 crore versus ₹10.9 crore from consumer services, a roughly 8:1 split.

Geographically, the base is metro and large-city gated housing, the segment where apartment density and household incomes make both advertising and paid services viable. The company reported serving tens of thousands of societies and, on the consumer side, around 5 million homes through its platform by FY25. The read-through: MyGate is less a security-software company that runs some ads, and more a media-and-services business that uses security software to assemble the audience.

The risks

• Monetisation ceiling in the core product: RWAs and management committees are budget-driven, collective buyers who resist price increases, capping SaaS pricing power. That pushes the business toward advertising, which is more cyclical and competitive than subscription revenue and can swing with brand-marketing budgets.
• Audience concentration and TAM: revenue skews to metro gated communities. Growth beyond that means either deeper monetisation of the same homes (more ads, more take rate) or expansion into thinner, harder-to-serve segments, both with limits.
• Competition and switching dynamics: rivals including NoBrokerHood and ADDA target the same societies. Once a committee standardises on a platform the switching cost is real, but winning a new society is a slow, sales-heavy grind, which is part of why ground-operations cost was the first thing cut in 2023.
• Profitability is young and thin: FY25’s adjusted operating EBITDA of ₹0.4 crore is breakeven by a whisker, and the company still posted a ₹15.4 crore net loss after ESOP and other charges. The turnaround is real but not yet a durable profit engine.

The takeaway

MyGate’s lesson is that the wedge product and the business model rarely earn the same way. The security register got MyGate into the apartment, but it was never going to fund the company; the residents it assembled did, through advertising and services. Founders who fall in love with the wedge and expect it to also be the profit centre often burn years, and in MyGate’s case over ₹200 crore in a single reported year, before the market forces them to monetise the asset they actually built, which was attention inside India’s gated homes. The discipline arrived late and involuntarily, through a funding winter and a 30% layoff, but it turned a cash-burning growth story into a business that at least breaks even. The transferable point: know which part of your product is the hook and which part is the business, and do not confuse the two until your investors force you to.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns MyGate and what is its legal name?

MyGate is the brand of Vivish Technologies Private Limited, a Bengaluru-based private company founded in 2016. It is backed by investors including Tiger Global, Tencent, Prime Venture Partners and JS Capital, and is not publicly listed as of September 2026.

Is MyGate profitable?

Not yet on a full statutory basis. In FY25 MyGate reported a net loss of ₹15.4 crore, down 61% year-on-year, but it reached adjusted operating EBITDA breakeven (₹0.4 crore) and ₹7.1 crore profit before tax excluding ESOP costs, per RoC filings reported by Inc42.

How does MyGate make most of its money?

Despite its security branding, advertising is the largest stream, contributing an estimated 65-70% of FY25 revenue, followed by SaaS subscriptions and smart-home hardware. Consumer services such as bill payments and home services are a smaller share.

How much has MyGate raised and what is it worth?

MyGate has raised a reported $79.5 million to $83.3 million across roughly eight rounds, including a $56 million Series B in October 2019 led by Tencent and Tiger Global. Its last reported valuation was roughly $194-203 million, dated late 2022 to April 2023, and has not been publicly refreshed since.

Why did MyGate lay off staff in 2023?

In February 2023, amid the funding winter, MyGate cut about 30% of its workforce, reducing headcount from roughly 600 to about 400, mainly in ground operations and community engagement, as part of a cost reset that helped shrink losses over the following two years.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• entrackr, “MyGate total revenue nears Rs 110 Cr in FY24; losses shrink by 82%” (November 2024)
• entrackr, “MyGate revenue soars 77% to Rs 71 Cr in FY23, losses shrink” (August 2023)
• Inc42, “Mygate’s Operating Revenue Jumps 35% To INR 96.2 Cr In FY24” (2024)
• Inc42, “Mygate Trims FY25 Loss By 61% To ₹15.4 Cr” (2025)
• Inc42, “Bengaluru-Based MyGate Lays Off 30% Workforce Amid Funding Winter” (February 2023)
• Inc42, “MyGate Raises $56 Mn Series B Funding From Tiger Global, Tencent And Others” (October 2019)
• StartupTalky, “MyGate Turns EBITDA Positive in FY25” (2025)
• YourStory, “Tiger Global-backed MyGate lays off 30% workforce” (February 2023)
• Tracxn, Vivish Technologies Private Limited company and funding profile (2026)
• PitchBook, MyGate company profile: valuation and funding (2026)
• CB Insights, MyGate financials: total raised (2026)
• Wikipedia, “MyGate” (accessed September 2026)
• Trading Economics, USD/INR reference rate (18 September 2026)

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