Toronto-based start-up
Flybits—with the help of several private sector partners, the MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund, and Ryerson Futures—hopes to revolutionize the way that mobile technology integrates into our daily lives and into the texture of our cities.
They’ve created a platform that helps bring a huge variety of data and apps together into a seamless experience, and they’ve just closed a major round of Series A financing that will enable them to double their 16-staff complement within a year.
When people talk about the kind of apps they wish they had, says Flybits CEO and founder Hossein Rahnama, they often describe tools that are context-sensitive and responsive: in an ideal world, for instance, your alarm clock would not only know your schedule but also know if your boss was running late, and know when to wake you up to accommodate both of those facts. Flybits has created a platform that aims, eventually, to do just that: it’s a context-aware platform that integrates information from a wide variety of sources and apps, and customizes the information it provides to an individual user based on his or her needs.
We’ve heard about apps like these before: the fridge that emails you a grocery list based on what’s left inside, for instance. “If you want to develop these applications,” says Rahnama, “you typically need to go to an app developer…who builds a very monolithic, non-scalable application.”
What distinguishes Flybits is that it aims to build a platform that is flexible and user-driver, rather than developer-driven: one where, he goes on, “rather than enabling engineers to build apps we enable people to build apps for their own experiences; you own that experience, you built it for yourself.”
To make this all more concrete, says Rahnama, imagine a Toronto app for Pan-Am visitors. It would start as your airport assistant (understanding your itinerary), and as you took the Union-Pearson Express it would become your transit assistant; then once you arrived at Union it would serve as your navigator—one continuous experience that eliminates the need to switch from app to app, and which could deliver all the information in whatever language you (as a traveller to Toronto) find most useful.
So far Flybits’ focus has been focusing on serving corporate clients, to allow the start-up to monetize and grow. (Among those clients are the City of Ottawa, GO Transit, and the provincial ministry of transportation.) They plan to open a free, public-facing consumer platform sometime in 2015.
Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Hossein Rahnama, CEO and founder, Flybits