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The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the rise of digitisation like never before. With education, commerce, banking facilities, etc., moving to the digital space, there’s no doubt that cybercrime is also on the rise. 

According to recent reports, cybercrimes are estimated to cost the economy a whopping $6 trillion in 2021 — double the impact suffered from 2015. 

With recent data breaches in Air India, Domino’s, JustDial, Unacademy, JusPay, Dr Reddy’s, Lupin, and Bigbasket, among others — the demand for cybersecurity solutions is likely to grow.  

As cybercriminals continue to capitalise on the pandemic for financial gain, geopolitical supremacy, and reputational motives, Tapendra Dev decided to start Secure Blink to close the underlying loopholes that make businesses prone to cyber-attacks.

With this aim, product R&D was started in 2019, while the company was officially registered in March 2020.

Cybersecurity product

The Noida-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) B2B startup targets the application security of organisations with key specialisation in threats and vulnerability. 

The bootstrapped startup’s product — ThreatSpy — is an end-to-end agentless application security management platform, incorporated on the framework of user entity behaviour analytics (UEBA) and zero-trust strategy. 

The machine learning (ML)-based product offers comprehensive threat reports from preliminary assessment to administration. 

ThreatSpy comes with three unique features — vulnerability management, application healthbot, and version management. 

It concludes within a four-step problem-centric approach to mitigate and eliminate critical vulnerabilities — mostly identified at the codebase of the application — through detection, prioritisation, remediation, and prediction by reducing the risk of getting occupied by underlying threats across the IT assets. 

According to Gartner and IBM, over 96 percent of applications run with some vulnerabilities. Over 43 percent of the vulnerabilities can be traced back to the application, which easily leads to a cyber attack. 

In fact, almost 72 percent of vulnerabilities are found in indirect dependencies, resulting from complex remediation plans.

ThreatSpy claims to have over 92 percent vulnerability detection and future attack prediction accuracy. 

“We are capable of addressing the emerging needs of the business to increase the extended vigilance across the IT assets, execute proactive and preventive measures against the detected and predicted threats and vulnerabilities,” Tapendra explains. 

Business model

ThreatSpy comes in three different pricing models — a starter subscription plan of $250, a pro subscription plan of $650, and an enterprise subscription that can be negotiated and fully customised, depending on the requirements.

“We offer competitive and economical product subscription plans solely depending upon the situation and needs of clients only after conducting a preliminary assessment to offer targeted solutions,” CEO and Co-founder Tapendra says.

Explaining the installation process, Tapendra says, ThreatSpy doesn’t require any additional pre-requisite to get installed in the enterprise system. After the users subscribe to a plan, they require to log in with the shared credentials into the product dashboard for starting the initial setup, which includes the domain/IP verification. 

“After that, our product is ready to remain operational across the IT system of that organisation,” he adds.

Market size and user base

According to NASSCOM-DSCI, the Indian cybersecurity services industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of 21 percent to touch $13.6 billion by 2025.

Secure Blink is also planning to create a mass-level cyber awareness programme by leveraging its curated resource library. The library has three distinct sections — threat feeds, threat research, and white papers — explaining cybersecurity through laymen terms. 

“We have scanned over 17,000 IPs and are growing at over 29 percent per month, the founder claims.

He adds that its resources section receives over 15,000 monthly visitors on average, with over 30,000 page views, growing steadily at 57 percent. 

The back story

With over seven years of experience in multiple verticals of cybersecurity, Tapendra is a cybersecurity researcher and DevSecOps engineer.

Before starting Secure Blink, Tapendra has helmed the position of CTO at a series of startups, including RIT Solution, FreshoKartz Agri Products, and Netcrux.

With a team size of close to 12 people across several verticals, Tapendra drives all teams along with the core team.

Moving forward

SecureBlink’s product ThreatSpy has been validated as the best product for ‘Work From Home’ by the Data Security Council of India in its WFH Security Use Cases Report. 

Besides, the startup is recognised and accredited by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the Government of India, DSCI, and Startup India.

“Our upcoming plans are concentrated on the overall product improvement with sales expansion across different regions while making various strategic alliances along the way,” the founder says.

The startup has crossed the minimum viable product (MVP) and at present is at an early traction stage. 

The company expects an annual run rate of over $620,000 with an expected overall profit margin of 11 percent for this fiscal year.

“We are in conversation with a couple of potential investors with some soft commitments. We are positively looking forward to any other investment opportunities,” Tapendra says.

Secure Blink also aims to reach over 20 countries globally, with more than 1000 paying clients by the end of FY21.

Tapendra claims to not have any direct competitors due to the comprehensive nature of its product, which offers services all across the application security arena. 

However, it still considers other cybersecurity startups, including Sqreen and Cobalt.io, as its indirect contenders.