Following is the text from the video chat between Aradhna Gupta, Founder of Access Alts, and Mohit Garg, CEO Oloid, who talks in detail about Oloid being an identity platform targeted for deskless workers.
What is Oloid?
Oloid is an identity platform targeted towards deskless workers, and it is enabling business workflows, such as time-clocking—when a worker comes in, how their timestamp is recorded in the time and attendance system using a facial identity. Also secure access control—so in a workplace when a worker is going about accessing secure areas, through turnstiles and doors, how can those be activated again using the same unifying facial identity.
And now we’ve recently added attributes for temperature scanning, where we are able to also identify if this worker presents any kind of contagion risk, and may be required to do additional medical screening for this individual before coming in proximity of other co-workers.
Why Deskless Workers?
In terms of prioritizing our sequence of markets, we have prioritized deskless workers first. Because one, it’s an underserved segment. (Modern) identity solutions for deskless workers do not exist. Centralized identity is missing in the market. And secondly, we were able to tie in many of these use cases directly to ROI. So whereas for a desk worker, it’s more of a convenience, removing friction type of a use case. For a large manufacturer, we had ROI models where we could be saving just $20 million in improved identity assurance and reducing payroll inaccuracies through better time and attendance measurement. So we wanted to build an application, build software, which has a very strong payback period. And we were able to do that with deskless workers.
Relevance During COVID-19
Now, mind you, the story so far leads up only until February this year, when COVID-19 pandemic hit the entire world of business. That conversation suddenly turned into where our customers are saying, how do I create safety at my workplace? (We had learned from) articles where employers in Asia and eastern parts of the world had instituted methods for temperature scanning to employees as they enter the premises, because there could be a risk of spreading an outbreak at the workplace which no employer would want. You would want there to be safety. So we quickly created (safety) attributes around the identity, so that every day when the workers go through their clocking process or access control process, we would provide an additional scanning of their temperature. And again, our product is an integrated identity product and we integrate a variety of off-the-shelf hardware. We integrated it with IP cameras for facial identity. We also integrate with IoTs for identity. We were able to quickly add thermal cameras to the list of integrations.
Today, we are very proud to be of service (in these tough times). It’s a time where the world is confronted with serious problems. And our OLOID team is excited about being part of the solution here. We are very excited about working with more and more businesses, enabling back to work safety at work programs. And thermal scanning is just the beginning. We have already forged partnerships where they don’t have to provide every piece of the puzzle (in order to deliver an end-to-end comprehensive COVID-19 readiness solutions). We have partners who are bringing contact tracing and social distancing IoT solutions to the market. We provide identity to those partners and scaling up the solution.
All in all, we believe that in the foreseeable future, we will be able to help customers implement a whole framework on creating a contagion-safe, COVID-19 healthy environment with virus contagion-safe applications on our platform and be relevant to the current time, and help solve the most pressing needs for our customers.
Market Opportunity & Penetration Strategy
Overall, we’re looking at about 700 million workers globally in the target industries we’re going after. Within the US, it’s (our addressable market is) close to about 80 million deskless workers. Within that, if you subsegment, we are addressing high value industries ahead of the others where the worker is providing some either specialized skill or specialized production activity or construction activity because there the risk to resources and assets is higher. So we narrowed the market down to about 15 million workers in the United States as our initial target market. And now we’re looking to expand globally. Within this market, we looked at the comparable identity companies in the desk space, like Okta, which is a public company, close to 700+ million in revenue, and over 20 million users.
We used this economics to build our projection on how the market outlook would look like over a period of time. So we certainly look at this as, even at 5, 10 percent of penetration of the market, this is a billion dollar plus revenue opportunity.
Revenue Model
In order to get there, we have identified high value use cases (for our customers). And for those use cases, we have brought a subscription model, which is a per worker, per month, per year type of model. Our typical target customer is a thousand plus workers because they value a sophisticated identity management framework. They get more benefit out of it.
So a typical account size is going to be a 6 figure account as it lands going up to 7 figure once we penetrate that account completely. We’re already working with two very large organizations. One is a Fortune 500 company in manufacturing space. The other is one of the largest construction companies in North America, both of them seven figure accounts. And we are looking to have close to 10 customers over the next year, which will begin in a very healthy range for a strong Series A raise with an above benchmark ARR by next year.
Path to Profitability
We have had a very healthy unit economics right from the beginning. Obviously, it is at a smaller base right now. We are looking at building a model which allows us as a scenario of profitability as early as next year. And the context is we are looking at a very uncertain environment from an economic standpoint. So in our conservative scenario, we can be profitable next year.
Founder’s Vision
I’m confident that the whole OLOID team will agree that our goal is to operate the intersection of end-user focused products which upholds privacy and the ethical standards from identity (data) management standpoint while delivering business value. And to put it in simple words, if we were able to gain (and keep) the trust of our end users, where they are willingly committing and managing their identity into our platform, not just for one employer but across employers, that for us would be proof that they have developed true success with the product. This will create huge network effects. So we want to be a single sign on for the desk-less worker, not across one employer, but across the history of the employment of a worker.
An Entrepreneur’s Journey
So the story of Oloid. It’s rooted in my varied experiences over the years, primarily for the last 20 years I spent in the Silicon Valley. I came here to study at Stanford and was a deeply technical person, right out of engineering school, Master’s in Electrical Engineering. And that’s when I grew the passion for building products and building startups. And over the years, I have been searching for purpose with the products that I’m building.
So just to give you some background, my previous startup, which is a fairly successful company, raised about $80 million. I ran a revenue for that company for about 8 years. We were building a product for sales enablement, sales training space and enabling sales teams for the moment of truth. After this success, I was looking for an even more profound purpose in my next venture. I was looking for – how do I make this relevant and impact an even wider set of users? And I am enterprise product builder. So I wanted to look at ideas and spaces with an enterprise. I can’t claim to know B2C space. And within enterprise, I realized that there’s so much technology being built for knowledge workers.
There is this beautiful thing called single sign-on for username and password management, which we as knowledge workers enjoy. But as I was looking around in terms of the technology that exists for deskless workers, there was a strong theme that was emerging. Even in venture trends, I could see that deskless worker focus was a very strong theme.
Destiny brings co-founders together. So that’s when I met my co-founder Madhu, who came from a very strong identity management and AI background. He had built a voice-based identity. He has a patent in Bluetooth-based identity protocols. And when my excitement about the deskless worker market met with his technology prowess, we started to think about how we would build an identity solution for the deskless worker.
So that was an idea germinated over a discussion and got into deep market research and analysis. We investigated the various solutions that were out there. And we found that there were two big pain points. One was from the end user perspective. The workers have to use a variety of different interactions, whether it’s using fingerprint in one device, badge in another device. There was no centralized unifying identity and seamless user experience that desk workers or knowledge worker enjoy. Secondly, from an organizational standpoint, we found that because there’s no unifying identity, organization is not able to manage the workflows in a cohesive manner.
So just to give you an example, at CISO, which is an important role, a Chief Information Security Officer. When we interviewed industry CISOs, we found that most of them are managing their knowledge workers, desk workers really well, but they do not have an identity management framework for deskless workers. With this knowledge, we started exploring how we would go about solving this problem with a wedge approach.
When we look at B2B products, it’s really important to have the initial use case identified, which can help penetrate the market fast, and they’re not too complex to implement and deploy. Through our market research, when we looked at different segments in the market, we found that the high value opportunities with the industries companies. These companies were not building commodity products. They were building specialized products. They valued identity more than the ones which wouldn’t have risk from identity. So if you had an identity assurance lapse, then they were okay with that. This is the journey over the last two years. We started focusing on high value manufacturing, healthcare, pharmaceutical manufacturing as areas we would bring about a single sign-on identity for the deskless worker.
