Real Life Data, Inc.

No-code platform for data collection, management, and IoT cloud applications.

Website: https://reallifedata.net/

Cover Block

PUBLIC

| Field | Value | |---| | Name | Real Life Data, Inc. | | Tagline | No-code platform for data collection, management, and IoT cloud applications | | Headquarters | Austin, Texas, United States | | Founded | 2020 | | Stage | Seed (self-described early-stage) | | Business Model | SaaS | | Industry | Data infrastructure / IoT applications | | Technology Type | Software (Non-AI core, with assistive features) | | Geography | North America | | Growth Profile | Venture Scale (intent, unconfirmed by traction) |

Links

PUBLIC

Executive Summary

PUBLIC

Real Life Data, Inc. ("RLD") is an Austin-based software company building a no-code platform that lets non-engineers stand up data collection workflows, IoT cloud applications, and downstream analytics from a single environment [Real Life Data website, October 2023] [ZoomInfo]. The company traces its origin to friction the founders encountered while gathering data across research projects, schoolwork, and FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) scouting, which led them to generalize the problem into a horizontal platform [Real Life Data website]. RLD began product work in early 2020 and shipped a beta in early 2023, with a public open-beta motion targeted initially at the FRC scouting community as a wedge user base [Real Life Data website] [Chief Delphi]. The company describes RLD One as "a platform for creating IoT cloud applications quickly and with no coding," augmented by what it calls "AI and intelligent services" that walk users through configuration [Real Life Data wiki]. Funding, investor identities, and revenue are not disclosed in any source captured for this report, and Crunchbase does not list a priced round on the company's profile [Crunchbase]. The legal entity is incorporated as Real Life Data, Inc., per its own privacy policy dated October 15, 2023 [Real Life Data privacy policy, October 2023]. Over the next 12 to 18 months the watch items are straightforward: conversion of the FRC open beta into paid or retained users, evidence of a second vertical wedge beyond robotics scouting, and any first external capital event that would put names and numbers behind the platform thesis.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Confirmed via Real Life Data's own website and privacy policy, with corroborating descriptions on ZoomInfo and LinkedIn; no third-party press or funding records located.

Taxonomy Snapshot

| Axis | Value | |---| | Stage | Seed / pre-disclosed | | Business Model | SaaS, no-code platform | | Industry / Vertical | Data infrastructure, IoT applications, vertical wedge in robotics scouting | | Technology Type | Software (Non-AI core) with assistive features | | Geography | North America (Austin, TX) | | Growth Profile | Venture Scale intent, traction unconfirmed |

Company Overview

PUBLIC

Real Life Data is a privately held Delaware-style C-corp operating as Real Life Data, Inc., headquartered in Austin, Texas [Real Life Data privacy policy, October 2023]. The founding narrative on the company's own site is unusually candid: the team describes recurring frustration with ad hoc data capture across academic research, school projects, and robotics competition scouting, and concluded that a general-purpose no-code data platform could serve all three audiences [Real Life Data website]. That positioning, a horizontal platform discovered through vertical pain, shapes the way the company has gone to market.

The public milestone trail is short but consistent. Initial product work began in the first months of 2020, according to the company's leadership page, with a slightly different date ("first few months of 2021") appearing on the sister site rld.one, suggesting either a re-baseline of the engineering effort or imprecise copywriting between properties [Real Life Data website] [rld.one]. A beta version of the platform was released in early 2023, and the privacy policy governing the site and software was last updated October 15, 2023 [Real Life Data privacy policy, October 2023]. Around the same window, the company opened a public beta of a digital scouting app creation tool aimed at FRC teams, posted to the Chief Delphi community forum [Chief Delphi].

Beyond those touchpoints, the public record is thin. Crunchbase carries a profile but its short description appears to conflate Real Life Data with an unrelated medical-data entity, which is a known disambiguation hazard for the name [Crunchbase]. CB Insights similarly carries a stub that references an investor ("Atrys") and an "Acquired" status that do not match the Austin company's own statements and almost certainly belong to a different organization sharing the name [CB Insights]. Investors evaluating RLD should treat database entries with caution and rely on the company's own filings and site as the canonical record.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Founding story, HQ, and entity confirmed by the company's own privacy policy and website; third-party database records appear to be cross-contaminated with same-name entities.

Product and Technology

MIXED

RLD One is positioned as an end-to-end data platform that compresses what would normally be a stack of separate tools (form builder, ingest pipeline, IoT broker, storage, workflow, dashboarding) into a single no-code environment [PUBLIC] [Real Life Data website, October 2023] [LinkedIn]. The company's own wiki describes the first step in any RLD project as deciding "how data, messages, or controls will get into RLD," with the platform then offering "AI and intelligent services that help guide you" through configuration [PUBLIC] [Real Life Data wiki]. LinkedIn's company description frames the offering as "the first fully integrated solution for creating a data and data analytics system encompassing data capture, data storage, data management, workflow, data analytics, and visualization" [PUBLIC] [LinkedIn].

The most concrete shipped surface today is the FRC scouting toolkit, which lets robotics teams design custom digital scouting forms and collect match data without writing code [PUBLIC] [Chief Delphi] [Real Life Data website]. This is a useful tell for product readers: it suggests the underlying primitives (form schema, mobile/tablet capture, sync, aggregation, visualization) are real enough to support a live user community, even if the broader IoT cloud story is still being built out. ZoomInfo's third-party summary describes the platform as letting users "easily connect IoT devices, automate data workflows, and visualize insights without the need for engineering expertise," which is consistent with the company's own framing [PUBLIC] [ZoomInfo].

Underlying tech stack details, hosting choices, security certifications, and SLA posture are not disclosed in any captured source, and there are no public job postings to infer from. The "AI and intelligent services" language on the wiki is not specified further, and investors should treat it as guided-configuration UX rather than a model-layer claim until the company documents otherwise [PUBLIC] [Real Life Data wiki].

Data Accuracy: ORANGE -- Product surface confirmed via company website, wiki, and a live community beta; technical architecture and AI substance unverified.

Market Research and Opportunity

PUBLIC

The market RLD is reaching for sits at the intersection of three categories that have each attracted significant venture attention independently: no-code application development, IoT device management and cloud connectivity, and self-serve business intelligence. The reason this matters now is that the buyer for all three is increasingly the same person, an operations or domain lead inside a mid-market company who needs to capture, route, and visualize data without commissioning an engineering project.

No named third-party market sizing report for RLD's specific wedge appears in the captured research, so any TAM figure here would be inferred. What can be said from the cited material is directional: the company itself frames its addressable user as anyone who today struggles to collect data across research, education, and competition contexts, and extends that to commercial IoT and BI use cases [Real Life Data website] [LinkedIn]. The FRC ecosystem alone (the FIRST Robotics Competition) involves several thousand high school teams globally and is a recognizable beachhead for tooling vendors, as evidenced by the active Chief Delphi community where RLD's beta announcement drew engagement [Chief Delphi].

Demand drivers worth flagging from the cited evidence: the proliferation of low-cost sensors and connected devices that need a destination; the maturation of no-code as a buying category that procurement teams now accept; and the persistent shortage of data engineers, which pushes capability down to domain users. Adjacent and substitute markets are crowded and well-capitalized, including general no-code app builders, IoT platform-as-a-service offerings from hyperscalers, and self-serve BI tools. RLD's bet is that none of those substitutes presents a single integrated workflow from capture through visualization for a non-technical user.

Regulatory and macro forces are mostly indirect. Data residency and privacy regimes (GDPR in Europe, a patchwork of US state laws) raise the bar for any platform that handles user-collected data, and RLD has at least posted a formal privacy policy reflecting that posture [Real Life Data privacy policy, October 2023]. Macro tightening of software budgets cuts both ways: it pressures new-vendor adoption but rewards consolidation plays that replace multiple tools.

| Sizing Claim | Value | Source | |---| | RLD beta release | Early 2023 | [Real Life Data website] | | FRC scouting wedge community engagement | Open beta thread on Chief Delphi | [Chief Delphi] | | Privacy policy currency | Updated October 15, 2023 | [Real Life Data privacy policy, October 2023] |

Analyst takeaway: in the absence of a named third-party TAM, the credible read is that RLD is targeting a real and growing convergence (no-code plus IoT plus BI) but has not yet published evidence sizing its slice of it. The FRC beachhead is an intentional, low-cost way to validate the capture-and-visualize loop before chasing enterprise IoT.

Data Accuracy: ORANGE -- Category framing supported by company and third-party descriptions; no cited market-size report specific to RLD's wedge.

Competitive Landscape

MIXED

RLD is positioned as a single integrated environment in a market where most buyers today stitch together two or three specialized tools, and that integration claim is both the differentiator and the burden of proof.

The first competitive frame is the no-code application builder segment, populated by well-funded incumbents that allow users to assemble forms, workflows, and simple data backends. RLD's claim to differentiation against that segment, on the evidence of its own wiki, is the explicit IoT ingest path: "how data, messages, or controls will get into RLD" is treated as a first-class question [Real Life Data wiki]. Most general-purpose no-code builders treat device telemetry as an afterthought routed through external middleware. If RLD can make device-to-dashboard genuinely turnkey for non-engineers, that is a defensible wedge against the horizontal no-code field [PUBLIC].

The second frame is the IoT platform segment offered by hyperscalers and specialist vendors. These are technically deep but require engineering staff to operate, which is the exact friction RLD is targeting. The exposure here is obvious: a hyperscaler can release a no-code overlay at any time, and RLD does not own the device or network layer. Its defensibility against that risk depends on UX maturity, vertical templates (FRC scouting being the first), and the speed with which it can accumulate a library of pre-built capture-to-visualization recipes that a generalist platform would not bother to build [PRIVATE inference].

The third frame is the self-serve BI segment. RLD's integrated story positions visualization as the back end of its own pipeline rather than a separate purchased tool. That is attractive for SMB and education buyers but unlikely to dislodge entrenched BI standards inside larger enterprises, which is a channel RLD probably should not try to own in its first three years [PRIVATE inference].

The most plausible 18-month competitive scenario: RLD wins if it converts the FRC scouting community into a reference base of thousands of active users, then uses that proof to enter a second vertical (field research, facilities monitoring, or small-scale industrial telemetry) with a templated offering. RLD loses if a general-purpose no-code vendor or a hyperscaler ships a credible IoT-aware template gallery before RLD has accumulated enough user love and case studies to be the obvious choice for the no-engineer buyer.

Data Accuracy: ORANGE -- Category framing supported by cited product descriptions; absence of named competitors in captured sources limits head-to-head verification.

Opportunity

PUBLIC

If RLD executes against its stated platform thesis, the prize is to become the default capture-to-visualization layer for the long tail of users who will never hire a data engineer.

The headline opportunity. The single largest outcome RLD could plausibly become is the consumerized data platform for domain experts: the tool that a robotics coach, a field biologist, a small-factory operations manager, or a school district analyst reaches for when they need real data flowing into a real dashboard without filing a ticket with IT. The cited evidence that this outcome is reachable rather than aspirational is modest but real: the company has shipped a beta, has chosen a specific community wedge (FRC) where the user pain is acute and the buyers are reachable, and has framed the product as a single integrated workflow rather than a thinner layer on top of someone else's stack [Real Life Data website] [Chief Delphi] [LinkedIn]. The category precedent (Airtable, Notion, Retool, and similar tools that turned engineering-grade primitives into self-serve products) shows that a horizontal no-code data platform can compound into a multi-billion-dollar business when it lands a beachhead and rides it outward.

Growth scenarios.

| Scenario | What happens | Catalyst | Why it's plausible | |---| | FRC-to-education flywheel | RLD becomes the standard scouting and data tool across thousands of FRC teams, then expands into school STEM programs and university lab data capture | Open beta converts a meaningful share of FRC teams in the next competition season | Active community engagement on Chief Delphi and an FRC-specific signup page indicate intentional beachhead targeting [Chief Delphi] [Real Life Data website] | | SMB IoT consolidation | Small operators (HVAC, agriculture, light manufacturing) replace a stack of point tools with RLD as their device-to-dashboard layer | A templated vertical pack and a self-serve pricing tier | Company explicitly frames itself as "end-to-end" capture, storage, workflow, analytics, and visualization, which is the consolidation pitch [LinkedIn] [Real Life Data website] | | Embedded data backend for other no-code apps | RLD becomes the data plumbing other no-code builders integrate to handle device data and analytics they don't want to build | A documented API and a partnership with one larger no-code platform | Wiki framing of ingest as the first-class question suggests the architecture is being built ingest-first [Real Life Data wiki] |

What compounding looks like. The flywheel for a tool like RLD is template gravity: every active user who builds a scouting form, a sensor dashboard, or a research data set creates a reusable artifact that lowers the time-to-value for the next user in the same vertical. Combined with community-led distribution (the FRC forum motion is exactly this), the cost of acquiring the next user falls as the library grows. There is also a latent data-network effect: as more users route data through the platform, RLD accumulates schema patterns and workflow primitives that inform smarter defaults and the "intelligent services" the wiki already references [Real Life Data wiki]. None of this compounding is yet visible in disclosed metrics, so it remains a thesis rather than a proof.

The size of the win. Public comparables in the no-code and integrated-data category have reached meaningful scale: Airtable was last reported at a roughly $11B valuation, and BI category leaders have produced multi-billion-dollar exits. Translating that to RLD is a scenario, not a forecast: in the FRC-to-education flywheel scenario, a credible mid-case outcome is a focused vertical SaaS business in the low nine figures of enterprise value; in the SMB IoT consolidation scenario, the upper band is a horizontal platform whose comparables sit in the multi-billion range (scenario, not a forecast). Realizing either requires the kind of capital, hiring, and enterprise motion that RLD has not yet publicly demonstrated, which is precisely why the next 12 to 18 months of beta conversion and any first priced round are the data points to watch.

Data Accuracy: ORANGE -- Opportunity framing built from cited product positioning and community evidence; scale comparables drawn from public category data and explicitly labelled as scenarios.

Sources

PUBLIC

  1. [Real Life Data] Real Life Data homepage | https://reallifedata.net/

  2. [Real Life Data] Leadership at Real Life Data | https://reallifedata.net/team/

  3. [Real Life Data] Reallifedata FRC page | https://reallifedata.net/FRC/

  4. [Real Life Data] Reallifedata Wiki, Getting Started, what is RLD | https://reallifedata.net/wiki/GettingStarted/whatRLD.html

  5. [Real Life Data, October 2023] Real Life Data, Inc. Privacy Policy | https://reallifedata.net/privacy.html

  6. [Real Life Data] Real Life Data Beta signup | https://reallifedata.net/signUp/

  7. [rld.one] Real Life Data ONE | https://rld.one/

  8. [ZoomInfo] Real Life Data Overview, News & Similar companies | https://www.zoominfo.com/c/real-life-data/1325952556

  9. [LinkedIn] Real Life Data company page | https://www.linkedin.com/company/real-life-data-platform

  10. [Chief Delphi] Real Life Data presents Digital Scouting App creation tool, OPEN BETA | https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/real-life-data-presents-digital-scouting-app-creation-tool-open-beta/444908

  11. [Crunchbase] Real Life Data Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/real-life-data

  12. [CB Insights] Real Life Data Products, Competitors, Financials, Employees, Headquarters Locations | https://www.cbinsights.com/company/real-life-data

Articles about Real Life Data, Inc.

View on Startuply.vc