Dyte

Overview

Dyte sold the layer between a developer's product and the hard parts of a live call. Its SDKs handled participant state, audio and video, roles, layouts, chat, polls, recording, live streaming, and interactive plugins. A customer could ship a branded meeting experience without building a media stack or accepting the fixed interface of a consumer conferencing app.

Abhishek Kankani and Palash Golecha started the Bengaluru company in 2020 and entered Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch. Dyte raised an $11.6 million seed round, grew beyond fifty employees, and said its infrastructure had reached hundreds of thousands of people. In June 2025 the whole team joined Cloudflare. The product became Cloudflare RealtimeKit, and the old Dyte SDKs entered maintenance mode.

The transaction price is not public. This was nevertheless a clear strategic sale: Cloudflare supplied a global SFU, STUN, and TURN network, while Dyte supplied the client SDKs, UI components, and developer journey that made that infrastructure usable.^[1]

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Founding Story

Kankani and Golecha began building in November 2020, when remote work and online classes had made video a default product surface. Their first idea was a standalone calling application. The turning point came when customers asked to embed the technology inside their own products. Dyte moved down the stack and sold an API and SDK instead.^[2]

The first implementation carried a revealing debt. A client wanted the founders' demo application as an SDK, so the tiny team adapted it. UI elements and business logic remained tangled. That helped Dyte ship, but made customization and maintenance harder. The company later rebuilt the product around Web Core, a lower-level state and media SDK, with UI components layered on top.^[3]

That progression defined the company. Dyte was not only renting media servers. It was converting repeated integration work into primitives that a customer's engineering team could control. Kankani described the product as something its developer-founders would themselves want to use: fast to integrate, well documented, and open to customization.^[4]

Timeline

• November 2020: Kankani and Golecha begin building Dyte in Bengaluru.
• Winter 2021: The six-person team joins Y Combinator.^[5]
• 2021: Dyte launches beta web and mobile SDKs, joins Surge 05, and reports twenty-fold annual growth.
• April 2022: The company announces an $11.6 million seed round led by Unbound with Surge and Nexus Venture Partners.
• 2022: Dyte reaches more than fifty employees and releases its redesigned v2 SDK and API surface.
• 2023: The company expands from calls into live streaming and says its Product Hunt launch ranked first for the day.
• November 2024: Dyte doubles its media regions from four to eight and adds US, European, and Indian data-residency controls.^[6]
• June 5, 2025: Kankani announces that Dyte has joined Cloudflare after roughly a year of collaboration.
• 2025–2026: Dyte becomes Cloudflare RealtimeKit; legacy Dyte SDKs enter maintenance mode and migration guides direct users to the new packages.

What They Built

Dyte's basic unit was a meeting that a developer created through an API and joined through a client SDK. Presets defined participant roles and permissions. UI Kit supplied setup screens, participant grids, controls, chat, and polls; Core SDK exposed state and media for teams that wanted their own interface. Recordings, RTMP broadcasts, webhooks, analytics, and plugins extended the call.

The product spanned web, React, mobile, and desktop environments. TechCrunch showed Dyte changing brand colors, visible controls, roles, and plugins in minutes. Plugins could add a shared browser, whiteboard, file viewer, or game without reducing the meeting to screen sharing.^[7]