Appknox - Enterprise Mobile Application Security to Help You Secure Your Business

Preeti Karna

Apr 4, 2022 — 6 min read

Appknox Success Story

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Appknox.

Post-covid, the global mobile application market size is growing at a high pace. With the growth of applications, their security concerns have also become high. Regular threat assessments are needed to determine the best approaches to protecting a business against different threats. Appknox offers plug & play mobile app security solution to protect business.

Appknox is a cyber-security platform that helps business with its testing solutions to protect their data and their customer's data from threats. It has been listed in Gartner’s list of top mobile app security testing solutions.

Appknox - Company Highlights

Startup Name	Appknox
Headquarters	Bangalore
Industry	Application Security/ Cyber Security
Founder	Harshit Agarwal and Subho Halder
Founded	2014
Total Funding Raised	$650K
Website	appknox.com

Appknox - About
Appknox - Industry
Appknox - Founders and Team
Appknox - The Idea and Startup Story
Appknox - Name, Tagline, and Logo
Appknox - Products and Services
Appknox - Business Model and Revenue Model
Appknox - Customer Acquisition
Appknox - Challenges Faced
Appknox - Growth
Appknox - Funding
Appknox - Advisors and Mentors
Appknox - Competitors
Appknox - Tools Used in The Company
Appknox - Future Plans

Appknox - About

Appknox is a Bangalore-based mobile application security platform. It was founded in 2014 to provide mobile application security. They provide innovative security solutions for securing businesses and consumers on a global scale. Several enterprises, developers, and researchers use their security testing solutions to detect threats.

Appknox - Industry

The Mobile App Industry has seen exponential growth amongst millions of consumers who are adopting mobile technology to stay connected. As new technology and innovation are getting advanced, the requirement for security is more critical. Technology is evolving successively, neither traditional nor current methods of security surveillance cut the threats it is coming up with. The future of mobile app security industry calls for forward-thinking in order to be able to combat the innovatively designed attacks on businesses and financial institutions.

The post-COVID 19 global application security market size is expected to grow from USD 6.2 billion in 2020 to USD 13.2 billion by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 16.1% during the forecast period.

Appknox - Founders and Team

**Harshit Agarwal and Subho Halder, Co-Founders, Appknox**

Harshit Agarwal and Subho Halder are Co-founders of Appknox.

Harshit and Subho have been friends since 2008. They were in the same college. Subho, and three other buddies formed their Counter-Strike Clan during the first month of school. They shared rooms after graduation. Harshit worked at a startup while Subho worked at TCS and was a cybersecurity enthusiast. He used to conduct a lot of mobile app security training.

Appknox - The Idea and Startup Story

Around 2013 December, Harshit and Subho, both started having conversations about starting their own startup. The reason for it being a massive attraction which was developing on the mobile app front, they wanted to exclusively focus on the mobile security side. They started working on the idea and were accepted at JFDI in Singapore for their incubation program. That's when they were officially into working on Appknox full time as their start up.

Around 2014, they could see a trend where Mobile would have become the primary way of consuming internet services. A lot of companies were expanding on the growth of the mobile side and Appknox was going mobile-first. With that, businesses would be worried about their applications' security and founders wanted to solve this for enterprises and businesses. They launched their product in 2016 aiming to keep these businesses' applications secured.

Appknox - Name, Tagline, and Logo

Appknox Logo

Appknox was started initially with the name XyScan. Eventually, it was becoming hard to create the brand with it and founders were exploring to rename. They were selected for JFDI, Singapore an incubator and one of the startup Co-Founder helped them with name. It resonated with Fort Knox.

Their Tagline - "Proactive Always" was from the marketing team and the logo was built by a Fiverr designer.

Appknox - Products and Services

Appknox is a leading mobile app security platform, assisting businesses and organisations in securing their mobile apps.

Appknox uses a System + Human strategy to assist organisations secure the security of their mobile applications. They are solving the biggest problem of businesses and enterprises for their apps security.

Using Appknox automated SAST, True DAST, and API level testing, companies can execute an initial level of security test on a mobile application in under 90 minutes.

They can then enlist the help of mobile security professionals to run manual business logical checks on the app.

Appknox - Business Model and Revenue Model

Appknox is a SAAS product where businesses use the Appknox platform for continuous security testing. Appknox business model is pay as you use and unlimited scans using Appknox platform. Appknox also offers enterprise friendly on-premise services.

Appknox works with a lot of channel partners in LATAM, GCC and SEA. They enable their channel partners with pre-sales and post-sales support.

Appknox - Customer Acquisition

The initial launch of Appknox was a closed Beta that they launched for their first beta users. They had a few of the companies like PayTM, Freecharge, and a few other internet services companies that they had onboarded as their first 10 customers. They used to get connected with them through Tech events and LinkedIn in earlier days. Their first 50 customers were all outbound and that led us to a few media coverages. They detected an issue in Ola in 2016 and spoke about it. This further helped us in getting a few inbounds as well. As they grew from 50 to 100, they strategized their focus from enterprises and Banks.

Appknox - Challenges Faced

They started working with a lot of Internet companies in earlier days and it seemed to be working at the start. Bit the issue they faced was that these were themselves growing companies and required VAPT for probably once a year while they figure other growth parameters. That was not the ICP they could grow a lot as ACV is not very high and also a high level of attrition as a lot of those companies ended up shutting down so was building a leaky funnel for us where CAC is high and LTV is low. They moved to enterprises to cover this and that lead to very little churn for us and eventually, growth started showing.

Appknox - Growth

Appknox operates out of Singapore and India. They are a profitable business growing at 2X YOY. Appknox has major clients in SEA, GCC, LATAM and India. They have channel partners which are majorly MSSPs who offer Cybersecurity services over and above Appknox Platform. Appknox has helped 500+ Businesses to secure their mobile application.

They are looking at building their product expertise by making mobile app security a seamless process. They are looking at growing in the US, Europe, and other regions.

Appknox - Funding

Appknox has raised a funding of $650 K in 2015 from Jungle Ventures.

Date	Stage	Amount	Investors
2015	Seed Round	$650 K	Jungle Ventures

Appknox - Advisors and Mentors

Key people who advises Appknox team are:

Tiang Lim Foo - Venture partner, Next Billion Ventures
Priyam Bose - Global Head -Developer Products, Truecaller
Prasanna Krishnamoorthy - Partner, Upekkha Catalyst
Thiyagarajan Maruthavanan (Rajan) - Partner, Upekkha Catalyst
Sekhar Nair - Partner, Upekkha Catalyst

Appknox - Competitors

Some of the top competitors of Appknox are:

Datatherom
Nowsecure
Appdome
Redhunt

Appknox - Tools Used in The Company

Tools they use to run their startups are:

Slack
Pendo
Adroll
Fitbots
Superbeing

Appknox - Future Plans

Appknox is working for the release of a security dashboard that will help security researchers performing manual testing on mobile applications to use Appknox SAST/DAST and API Scan results to speed up the entire testing process. Along with it, Auto fuzzing for DAST and CI/CD are two other features that they are enhancing to smoothen up the entire security testing process.

FAQs

When was Appknox founded?

Appknox was founded in 2014 at Bangalore.

Who is the founder of Appknox?

Harshit Agarwal and Subho Halder are co-founders of Appknox.

Who are the competitors of Appknox?