If you’re looking to integrate video or audio calls into your product, you don’t necessarily have to build it out from the ground up. Unless you’ve got some super specific needs, there are SDKs that can help with much of the heavy lifting if your budget allows.

One such SDK is Dyte, the team behind which is announcing this week that it has raised an $11.6 million dollar seed round. Pitching itself as the "most-developer friendly" option, Dyte focuses on a handful of key points: fast integration, simple but flexible customization, and expandability by way of realtime interactive plugins.

That last bit is one that seems particularly neat. In addition to the video/audio calling SDK, they've built out a secondary SDK for building interactive experiences on top of those calls. Some of the examples they showed me were things like a shared web browser, a collaborative whiteboard, basic turn-based games, and a built-in file viewer where one person can talk while another, say, navigates slides (without either having to share their screen — just upload the slideshow file itself.) These Javascript-based plugins have access to metadata like each user's role — so you could, for example, make it so that only designated users can control the file viewer, or make a game where the call host can see things the players can't.

On the more user-facing side, Dyte offers up much of what you'd expect of a video chatting platform: different view layouts, chat and polls, screensharing, background removal/swapping tools, etc.

Image Credits: Dyte

Behind the scenes, they've made customization about as simple as can be. On a video chat with Dyte co-founder Abhishek Kankani (hosted on Dyte itself, of course), Kankani had a TechCrunch-themed chat interface (complete with TC branding and lots of green) up and running in just a few minutes. This same customizer let him control which of those aforementioned plugins appeared to users, change the look of the overall interface and which features appeared, and control user roles.