Have you ever thought about how construction site access is managed? It's old-school. Tech companies aren't in the business of turnstiles and gates. GateMate allows them to be.
Have you ever thought about how construction site access is managed? It's old-school. Tech companies aren't in the business of turnstiles and gates. GateMate allows them to be.
In the Construction Access Control System, workers are monitored by two separate yet equally important groups: the workforce management platforms - tech companies that investigate credentials, monitor permits and track attendance; and the access control companies -security companies that provide gates, turnstiles, fences and keys.
Workforce management platforms are modern tech companies, they are growth-orientated, churn-reduction focussed and selling multi hundred thousand dollar software contracts to large construction firms. Yet they lose revenue and contracts to antiquated security companies, because they cannot offer access control solutions.
The reason for this - a software company does not have the expertise, capability or operational capacity to develop and supply hardware.
GateMate bridges this gap. GateMate is a cloud-connected access control system available via API. It can be installed onto existing security hardware, or act as a standalone locking system for any door.
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Designing a 'middleware', let alone creating a new layer in an mature industry tech stack, is a unique design exercise. It is the product equivalent of launching a two-sided marketplace, where the key challenge is at early stage adoption at the very beginning. You might need suppliers on your marketplace to attract your buyers, but at the same time, why would suppliers let you clip their ticket if you don't have buyers?
For GateMate: why would construction firms pay for your hardware if you don't have the software integrator onboard. Similarly, why would tech companies partner with you, and bring you in on their enterprise deals, if you don't have any position in the market with the construction companies, and aren't installed in their hardware systems?
We address this in two ways, both are targeted around getting revenue and direct sales in the construction industry first, then taking that traction to the software companies for partnership, integration and eventually the acquisition of GateMate as a whole:
Alongside this, we're building a ChatIOT interface for GateMate, allowing site managers to fix access issues, generate and send keys, and check who is on site all via SMS.
GateMate is under active prototype iteration - key electronics, IOT, firmware and cloud message broker development is complete. Now into early stage industrial design elements, hardware testing, and UI development.
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