Sequretek : How it is Working Hard to Secure Your Startup!

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With the growing drive for digitalisation, though most of us organizations and the individuals working on behalf of them are witnessing a whole new era of seamless work and extending quality services without any major challenges, cybersecurity breaches and cyberattacks are inching towards a new level of potency each day. Such challenges, however, are being mitigated by various cybersecurity firms, one of which is Sequretek.

The Mumbai-based cybersecurity firm founded by Pankit Desai and Anand Naik, is one of the popular cybersecurity firms of India. Here's checking out the success story of Sequretek, along with all the information about its Co-founders, Team, Investors, Funding, Name, Logo, Business and Revenue Model, Growth and User Acquisition and more.        

Sequretek - Company Highlights

Sequretek - About
Sequretek - Industry
Sequretek - Founders and Team
Sequretek - Startup Story
Sequretek - Vision and Mission
Sequretek - Name, Tagline and logo
Sequretek - Product and Services
Sequretek - User Acquisition and Growth
Sequretek - Business model
Sequretek - Revenue model
Sequretek - Major challenges faced
Sequretek - Funding
Sequretek - Competitors
Sequretek - Partnerships
Sequretek - Awards and Recognition
Sequretek - Future Plans

Sequretek - About

Sequretek is a cybersecurity firm helping organisations focus on their main motive instead of worrying about cyber attacks. The company uses AI for the most part of its work, hence boosting their productivity and lowering down the expenses. There is a lot of hustle and inspiration in the startup story of Sequretek. Here is a few of them which are shared by the co-founder of Sequretek Pankit Desai, in his own words.

Sequretek - Industry

According to the latest report by Markets and Markets, the cyber security industry is expected to touch close to $300 billion by 2023 and is currently growing at over 10%. As per their forecasts from 2017 to 2023, in 2019, the market size is expected to be over $160 billion. The factors triggering this growth are strict data protection laws being implemented, rising cyber terrorism, and the growing need for SMEs to store data in the Cloud giving rise to cloud-based cybersecurity solutions.

Sequretek - Founders and Team

Sequretek is backed by 2 founders - Pankit Desai and Anand Naik.

Pankit Desai

Pankit has worked in senior roles in companies like Rolta, NTT Data, Wipro, Cognizant, IBM, and CMC. He has worked in North America for a large part of his career selling tech products to tech companies to accelerate their design of work. In his free time, he likes to catch-up on reading especially global affairs, world events as well as watching some good content on Netflix.

Anand Naik

Anand is a cyber security specialist who has worked with market leaders in this segment for over 2 decades. He has worked with companies like Symantec, IBM, and Sun Microsystems. He is a voracious reader and likes to stay abreast of contemporary topics, besides being a complete family man.

Sequretek is a strong team of 201-500 employees. Along with the founders Anand Naik and Pankit Desai, many other people are the reason of the growth of the company. To name some of them, Arun rathi is the CFO, Perverz Goiporia is the CTO, Deepali Mistry is the head of marketing and Vandana Chimanpure handles the HR department.

Besides having an open-door policy the company thinks it is important that the employees perceive an organization as a fair employer who cares about them. Fairness in all our dealings, transparency in our processes, and empathy in our interactions. They work on the overall employee development both professional and personal and stand by them in their hour of need and celebrate in their success.

As a young company, they are always in search of people who are committed to tech. They hire from colleges, senior resources from the industry and also have created an environment where leaders should come from within the Company. Therefore, they look for candidates who value learning, love challenges, and are ready to go that extra mile. Moreover, they should be Flexible and adaptive to the fast-paced environment.

Sequretek - Startup Story

My co-founder Anand Naik and I were discussing to take the plunge for a few years. Both of us were working in senior leadership roles, running large teams, accountable for profitability for a big chunk of business. Our leadership role gave us a sneak peak into the world of running a sustainable business, prepared us for ups and downs and toughed us up. But still giving up a well-paying job especially when you have family responsibility is never an easy decision. Having a co-founder with whom you can build a common vision and then have a core team that joins you on the journey makes the decision a bit more manageable.

Since both of them come from the tech industry, it was clear that they wanted to start a business in that domain. Cybersecurity emerged as a natural choice since Anand has been working in this segment for over two decades. Before launching Sequretek, he was in India, working as Saarc head for Symantec.

Sequretek - Vision and Mission

Sequretek was founded with a single vision to simplify security and bring down the cost of ownership. Cybersecurity has always been viewed as a cost centre where a certain number of products, regular patching, and updates are required to keep the system up and running. That was relevant at least two decades ago. With the changing digital landscape, evolution of cyber-attacks into more complex forms, companies are now worried and at the same time clueless about upping the ante of their cyber defence.

Many of them are still following the old school thought where they are buying the most sophisticated products. They don’t even realise if they even need it, if it is compatible with other security products, how much bandwidth they consume of a system, and if they are slowing down the entire IT architecture.

When they decided to start Sequretek in 2013, they didn’t want to follow the old narrative of pushing products down onto the customers. Plus, they wanted to build an agile system that can spot, analyse, react and protect a threat in near real-time because that is the differentiator in cybersecurity. Thus, their products are built on an AI platform, which are monitoring millions of incidents globally. At the same time, they are matching them in the Indian context to boil it down to a manageable handful of incidents per day. Therefore, helping organizations focus their energies on real problems and not go on a wild goose chase.

With such an approach, they hope to achieve our vision of simplifying security and driving down the cost of ownership for the enterprises.

Sequretek - Name, Tagline and logo

A few years into their journey, they had reached a point where we were confident that they are on the right track. The whole point was to simplify security and tell enterprises to take control of their cyber destiny rather than attackers taking control of it. With this thought process, they decided to redesign their logo to give out this messaging. Their new logo was unveiled in Oct 2018 amid top cybersecurity honchos and Gulshan Rai, Cyber Security Chief, India.

The Q in the logo is like a knob on any control, but on careful observation there’s no limit stopper at its base, mimicking the highest level /potential of a given machine. Going against the grain of traditional thinking in security that correlates security with restriction

Secondly, it denotes a power button, signifying the connected world that we look to protect.

The color orange cuts across the world as a color of culture and traditions, which is sacred and a serious matter to anyone using it. This is one color that moves nations and builds bonds of trust with undeniable assurance.

Sequretek - Product and Services

Sequretek offers its customers best-in-class products and services, which help them keep their guard up 24/7 to fight off any potential cyber attack. Their range of products include

IGA: Sequretek’s IGA (Identity Governance and Administration) is an access governance product for enterprises. IGA is used for defining access as per various parameters of employees, their managerial seniority, job profile location-based access, etc. The primary challenge it looks to address is ensuring that for every individual (employee /contractor) that exists in the company access to any technology privilege such as applications, shared folders, printers, network, the internet is commensurate with the role, and any change in the role which should have an impact on the privilege would be addressed immediately.

EDPR: This is a recent launch from Sequretek. EDPR is an endpoint detection, protection, and response product launched in Oct 2018 for enterprises. This product is built on an AI platform. When they started working on this product, in the endpoint security space, a single desktop needs 8 products to secure data loss. In an enterprise scenario where there are multiple endpoints, the complexity increases multifold. With the digital transformation wave and the choice of accessing the same info from multiple devices, we identified a market gap in the endpoint security space. EDPR comes with the features of 7 — 8 products rolled into one. Features like anti-virus, anti-phishing, app whitelisting backed by AI help the product learn and evolve to identify new kinds of threats too. This makes it possible for SMEs and even large enterprises to secure end nodes in a cost-effective and less complex manner at the same time have a product that responds to potential threats in near real-time

MDR: Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is their most evolved offering which is fast becoming the need of the hour for companies across the globe. The ever-increasing threats either in form of corporate espionage, state-sponsored cyberattack, or just a bunch of hackers trying to steal info to sell in the black market, has awakened many companies to come up with a security strategy where a threat can be identified before it causes damage and also that its monitoring should be near real-time. For achieving both these goals, Machine Language and Deep learning backed products can be a potential solution. In their Company, they have created an in-house malware lab, where 50 odd data scientists monitor 20 — 25 crore incidents on a daily basis across the globe using ML and deep learning. They use it to match those incidents to see similar patterns emerging in our client’s environment to identify a potential threat. If they see a red flag, a technical advisory is sent to their clients and their people on-site to patch the leakage if any.

Sequretek - User Acquisition and Growth

We have been lucky to be blessed to call some of the most marquee names in the industry as our customers. Both Anand and I have worked with companies that have sold to large enterprises as part of careers prior to Sequretek. This gave us unparalleled access to the buyer community in these companies and also credibility based on our past interactions with them. It was this personal credibility and integrity of the individuals involved I believe, got us the initial wins. Our ability then to execute on this helped create a momentum that has got us today to the stage where we have been able to create a momentum for growth.

Sequretek is growing at about 70%-80% year-on-year and growth has more than doubled from last year. For the next three years, it aims to continue to double its growth rate at 100%. they have already started international expansion with our office in the US to target the North American market and with plans to expand into other geographies viz. Europe, Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world, in the next few years.

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Sequretek - Business model

The Sequretek business model is in the B2B space and whilst security is industry agnostic, by the nature of the problem they address it is natural to find the most demand for what they do in the financial services sector.

Sequretek - Revenue model

In the recent past, they found the coverage needs coming from pharma, retail, logistics, manufacturing, and services segments as well. Their approach till recently has been that of direct customer acquisition both in India and North America, but with the scale-up they have started building out the indirect partner-led ecosystem as well.

Additionally, the preferred Sequretek revenue model is subscription based, and today they track upwards of 80% retention rates in their subscription business.

Sequretek - Major Challenges Faced

Building a company from scratch always comes with its own set of challenges. No doubt they also faced certain challenges. Whether in terms of finding a voice for themselves in the crowded market dominated by biggies, or identifying the right talent who could become part of their product-centric journey or raising capital at the right moments to meet their growth aspiration.

A common denominator for all of the challenges above is to create trust with the constituents who you are dealing with. The founders bring certain credibility in the industry that formed the nucleus around which a strategy for addressing each of the challenges was formed. As far as people are concerned, most of our management team comprises of individuals with whom we have some common connection. This allowed us to ensure that the ethos of founders is widely shared, they in turn ensured that the larger team gets built with the same ethos.

Sequretek - Funding

Sequretek raised $8 million on November 6, 2023, with a Series A funding round, for a total funding of $13 million till date.

Below are the funding details:

Sequretek - Competitors

Cybersecurity is a big market where different players differentiate themselves on the basis of their core offerings. In this context, their core offering is simplifying security and driving down the cost of ownership. They believe their positioning and tech innovation being worked in the house has helped them stay ahead of many of their peers. In all their offerings there are legacy players who have been around for a long time and have been solving the problem in a very set way. They are being challenged by newbies who have become disruptors.

Sequretek - Partnerships

Sequretek has seen some partnerships. One of the major partnerships that the company has seen is the collaboration with the Maharashtra State Co-operative Banks’ Association (MSCBA), which came in on 26th July 2019. As a part of this collaboration, they will launch a comprehensive enterprise cyber security program for co-operative banks in Maharashtra. Such an initiative will offer the option to all the 400-member co-operative banks of MSCBA to avail state of the art 24x7 cyber security operations, compliant as per RBI guidelines.

This initiative was inaugurated by Honorable Shri Ravindra Chavan, Minister of State for Information Technology, Ports, Medical Education, Consumer Protection, Food and Civil Supplies and Shri Satish Soni, Commissioner for Co-operation and Registrar of Co-operative Societies, in presence of board members of MSCBA and leaders of over 100 co-operative banks.

This partnership will certainly make the co-operative banks more secure. Through this initiative Sequretek will remotely monitor and respond to security threats that could potentially disrupt the co-operative banks IT infrastructure and in the process not only impact their brand reputation but also lead to financial loss. Sequretek and MSCBA will work jointly to train over 1,000 bank professionals in cyber security to manage threats on sites within the member banks, as well as build a cyber aware community.

Arkansas Center

At its Little Rock, Arkansas, headquarters, Sequretek has partnered up with the Arkansas Center for Data Sciences on February, 7, 2023 to assist the India-based business in filling approximately fifty roles.

Sequretek - Awards and Recognition

Stanford SEED program: Selected from 500+ companies from across India to create a transformation plan that can help the company scale up

Next Big Idea 2017 Winner: from 400+ companies across India, award by Canadian Government and Zone Startups

Top 100 Startups: By Centre of Research and Excellence, an initiative by Top CIOs of India

Top 50 Innovators: By world innovation council, 2018

Top 10 Fintech Startups: Fintegrate 2017

Sequretek- Latest Startup News and Updates

MSCBA and Sequretek join hands to announce comprehensive cyber security programfor co-operative banks in the State Mumbai, 26th July 2019The Maharashtra State Co-operative Banks’ Association (MSCBA) has joined handswith Mumbai-based cyber security company Sequretek[https://startuptalky.com/sequretek-story-founder-funding/…

StartupTalkyChayanika Goswami

Sequretek - Future Plans

They are currently in the midst of foraying into the North American markets. The goal is to set up operations in the American market, which is the world’s biggest cybersecurity playground. This will be followed by expansion to other geographies.

Sequretek - FAQs

What is Sequretek?

Sequretek is a cybersecurity startup based in India that offers its customers best-in-class products and services that help them keep their guard up 24/7 to fight off any potential cyber attack.

Who are the founders of Sequretek?

The Sequretek founders are Pankit Desai and Anand Naik.

What are the Sequretek products?

Their range of products include:

IGA: Sequretek’s IGA (Identity Governance and Administration) is an access governance product for enterprises. IGA is used for defining access as per various parameters of employees, their managerial seniority, job profile location-based access, etc.

EDPR:  EDPR is an endpoint detection, protection, and response product built on an AI platform.  EDPR comes with the features of 7 — 8 products rolled into one. Features like anti-virus, anti-phishing, app whitelisting backed by AI help the product learn and evolve to identify new kinds of threats too.

MDR: Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is their most evolved offering which is fast becoming the need of the hour for companies across the globe. The ever-increasing threats either in form of corporate espionage, state-sponsored cyberattack or just a bunch of hackers trying to steal info to sell in the black market, has awakened many companies to come up with a security strategy where a threat can be identified before it causes damage and also that its monitoring should be near real-time.