Building a Capital-Efficient, Highly Scalable Smart City IoT Venture: LYT CEO Timothy Menard (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds to me like you have very large deals in your pipeline. At some level, $5 million may be the only money you need to build this business.

Timothy Menard: Absolutely. The mindset was to build a company and be revenue-generating. Having these large contracts that pay 90% of the contract value in the first year is significant.

Sramana Mitra: Oh my goodness. That is fantastic! You won’t be able to recognize the revenue, though but cash-wise, it’s incredible for business-building.

Timothy Menard: Right. It gives us the flexibility and explosiveness where some of these deals are equivalent to other people’s Series A. One other thing, there was an additional $500,000 grant that was matched as well. Not only did we get that second SBIR, but we also took advantage of other money that the SBIR program had. We got $500,000 on matching funds. We got $150,000 in customer build-out. We’re shy of $2 million just in NSF money.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of the pipeline, how many cities are now working with you?

Timothy Menard: We don’t disclose our pipeline for competitive reasons, but we’re going to be in a lot of places by the end of the year.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of adoption are you seeing in the cities for this type of technology?

Timothy Menard: We’re seeing a 95% conversion rate for pilots.

Sramana Mitra: What is the interest level for pilots?

Timothy Menard: Extremely high. We’re in a market that was ruled by a monopoly for a very long time. Now there’s a new solution that is demonstrating better benefits.

Sramana Mitra: How many people do you have?

Timothy Menard: We’re shy of 20.

Sramana Mitra: In rolling out these projects, how much of it is product and how much is professional services?

Timothy Menard: There is an integration period that is professional services. We do integration between 60 and 180 days depending on how large the project is, which is unheard of for construction projects.

Sramana Mitra: After that, it rolls on its own?

Timothy Menard: Yes. Automation and a little bit of AI are what keeps it learning and calibrating. We don’t have to take what our current traffic management is in our communities for granted. Having had such a connected vehicle background in a space that is almost 20 years old now, it just really comes down to we need things that can be deployed today and are highly scalable, and also be transparent and demonstrate their value. Most of the systems have gotten away for far too long with set and forget.

Sramana Mitra: If you were to synthesize where the maximum value in ROI is, is it in traffic optimization?

Timothy Menard: Traffic optimization and congestion management.

Sramana Mitra: It’s smart city traffic optimization. Fantastic! Great story. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a Capital-Efficient, Highly Scalable Smart City IoT Venture: LYT CEO Timothy Menard
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