ActiFend: Providing Web Security
How did the entrepreneurial bug bite you?
There was this 1-year long internship in security that I was managing as the Chief Information Security Officer of Haryana. Towards the end of it, some of the interns threw a surprise by declining their high-paying campus jobs so that they could continue working a particularly tough project. That got me all excited, not only because I so badly wanted to solve it; but also because I saw that in all fairness to the kids, it should become a business entity. I got on the phone, talked to my old friend Joseph. He immediately agreed to drop his high-profile consulting assignment in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, and relocated with family to Chandigarh. In a way, we could say that Digital Self Defense Infosec was born from the spark of fresh-grads wanting to leave their campus jobs to solve a tough problem.
What were the challenges before you while setting up this startup?
– There was this technology challenge. It still is a complex beast and there are only a handful of companies in the world that can do this. While our young wizards had already proven themselves during their internship, it was still no small job.
– Then there was this market awareness issue. First off, majority of businesses still treat security as an after-thought. Secondly, existing solutions were so expensive, that most businesses had never even considered buying this. A good analogy would be “Would we consider buying a helicopter for our daily office commute?” So we had to break the mold of decades of conditioning.
– Somewhere in the middle we ran into supply-chain challenges when our initial products were hardware based.
To be honest, while we didn’t mind the first two challenges, we really didn’t like the hardware supply-chain issues. We lost two of our co-founders while battling this problem.
What are the challenges for startup companies setting up shop in India?
– The biggest frustration is the setup overhead. It took us only 1-day to register our company (great!), but all the related formalities took over two months of focus away from my customers. Banks are a royal pain in the wrong place even to open a business account; and then to operate. It is as if everyone expects a startup be setup like a big corporate with dozens of dedicated staff doing paperwork that doesn’t add any value to the customers.
– Then there is the talent acquisition problem. Most youngsters as well as experienced people seem to want either a Govt job or a cushy MNC job. The odd young entrepreneur wants to become a Mark Zukerberg overnight. It is an interesting challenge for us to find those elusive bright kids with a spark in their eye and a realization of what a startup can do to catapult their careers sky-high.
How is your business model different from the existing ones?
We are looking to commoditize a high-end very advanced technology based service – that of security visibility (see who your attackers are, in real time – so that you can defend better). The industry looks at this as premium & customized service, we believe the time is ripe for bulk of it to become commodity. Why can’t good security be as commonplace as web hosting?
Who are your clients? How do you look at expanding?
For the current product ACTIFEND, we are looking at security conscious website owners and website developers.
We have plans to release an Enterprise SaaS version of it soon. This would target security conscious IT teams looking to buy a visibility solution but don’t want to spend crores on it.
We are a part of the Microsoft BizSpark Plus program. We plan to work closely with Microsoft in a collaborative sales model for the Enterprise SaaS version. A few big consulting companies have also approached us partner with them on this.
The best and worst memories while setting up …
Every time a customer reacts with delight because of our alertness it gives me a big high. There was this customer who I called one day to tell him that an attacker hacked his website; it turned out that it was their own guy running some security tests, but the CEO was so happy that we were on to it so quickly. He now proudly mentions us as the guardians of his online business to his investors.
The worst memory is when two of our co-founders left, morale was down and there was talk of shutting shop because it didn’t look like we were going to be able to get over the hardware problems. Of course, we’re gritty if nothing else. So we got over it, pivoted a few times and got to this point.
About ActiFend:
ActiFend captures event logs from web sites and uses a powerful cloud-based analytics engine to detect application attack patterns. Threats that are relevant are detected in real-time and sent as alerts through a mobile application available on both Android and iOS.
