Teewe may do what Chromecast can’t: enter the living room of every home in India

Teewe’s office in Bangalore is anything but posh. Young staff mill about the room. Engineers alternate stares between phone and TV screen as they test an app. Boxes pile in one corner, waiting to be shipped out. It’s a busy day at the startup.

Sai Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Teewe, enters in a polo tee and shorts. He invites me into a room and away from the buzz. Grabbing a marker pen, he sketches out the company’s journey and vision, quite literally, on the boardroom table.

“We originally wanted to start a games studio,” says Sai, the “we” including Teewe co-founder Shubh Malhotra.

But halfway through, Sai noticed how the television set hasn’t changed through the years. Yes, displays were getting better, but not the way people interacted with it. The seed was sown for Teewe, an HDMI stick like the Google Chromecast that can make dumb TVs smart.

For now, there isn’t much separating the much-lauded Chromecast from the Teewe. Low price of under US$100? Check. Stream videos from your phone or laptop to the TV? Check.

So is Teewe a copycat? Not exactly.

“Our vision and direction is very different from the Chromecast,” he says, adding that products often start similar but diverge. And that’s exactly what he hopes to do after closing a US$1.7 million funding round from Sequoia Capital and India Quotient in early 2015.

The Teewe costs INR 2,399 (US$37), same as the first-generation Chromecast in India. That’s about the price of a set-top box, and Teewe wants to enter the home of every family by replacing the set-top box with a tiny stick containing the same features and more (it could become a game console, for example). Even better, it would use something families already own as the remote controller: the smartphone. That’s audacious.

The price makes this affordable to people in India, where the median monthly wage is US$295. The same story applies in Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, where wages are rising but relatively low.

“A guy’s not gonna have a separate Xbox, a guy’s not gonna have a separate set-top box, a guy’s not gonna have a separate Roku. Most probably he will want a good experience brought together in a single device,” Sai says with a passionate flourish.

Something for the whole family

Sai Srinivas, CEO and co-founder of Teewe

Sai will unveil a series of features to set Teewe apart. True to its gaming focus, Teewe will soon allow users to play mobile games on their TV screens – lag-free. Here’s how: instead of beaming the entire game from the smartphone, which clogs the wifi network, the game will be stored in the Teewe dongle, which is plugged into the TV.

The Teewe smartphone app acts as the controller, which sends simple commands to the dongle. Because the file size of these commands are minuscule, gamers can react instantly to what’s happening on screen, enhancing their experience.

Hard to build a hardware startup in India

Hiring? Not a problem