With nearly 700 million smartphones in use in India, the need to protect them from cyber threats has spawned a number of cybersecurity startups operating in consumer and enterprise segments. Gurugram-based bootstrap startup Protectt.ai Labs serves this market with its plug-and-play software solutions. “In India, there are over 200,000 mobile apps developed by Indian companies on the Google Play Store. Every time a company develops a mobile app, they ensure security themselves. Therefore, we developed a plug-and-play security component that can be integrated into mobile apps and offers comprehensive security by default,” said Manish Mimani, Founder and CEO of Protectt.ai Labs.
On the company side, the startup is currently concentrating on the financial sector, which primarily deals with highly sensitive data. “In India there is a large number of growing fintech apps. Banking, insurance and stock exchanges are some of the corporate sectors in fintech where we are finding tremendous opportunities,” says Mimani. While the solutions can be downloaded from the Google Play Store for individual users who can subscribe to the services after a free trial, the startup is working with its enterprise customers to integrate them into their system and then bill them per user. “Currently, the enterprise segment represents the largest part of our business with millions of protected devices. In addition to securing their businesses, there is a strong demand for a wide range of analytics services,” says Mimani.
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According to him, the demand for analytics is increasing every day as organizations seek to go beyond just identifying threats. With many data points available, organizations want to use them to understand threat patterns over time while leveraging AI to understand the behavior of devices on their network and predict how their network security may be compromised in the future. “Much of our R&D work involves designing and manipulating security features and analyzing how this may affect various mobile applications, operating systems and devices that our customers may be using,” says Mimani.
In the last two years, as the demand for cybersecurity increased drastically due to the digital boost caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the startup has experienced strong growth and continues to ride that wave. “Our first quarter sales this year are higher than last year’s full year sales. We will break even this fiscal year,” says Mimani.
Growth since the pandemic has also removed one of the biggest obstacles for the startup, namely creating awareness and enlightening potential customers while creating new types of challenges related to evolving threats and the subsequent deep engineering needed to counter them . “As a nation, we have a lot to improve in product development and especially in cybersecurity. We are actively working towards this,” says Mimani.
