Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 1)

I have never seen a company raise so much money from so many angels. It is far from standard practice in the industry, but Manmeet did it! Find out how…

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from and where were you raised? Give me the back story of your entrepreneurial journey.

Manmeet Singh: I’m from New Delhi, India. I did my education back in India. In about a year, I came to the US as a programmer for HCL. Since then, I’ve been in the IT field, working for large companies. In 1999, I made a move towards startups. I learned howto run the engineering team in a startup. I was the VP of Engineering for a startup which was funded by a client of Berkins. Everything went bust in 2001 because most of the IT companies had a major problem.

I took a year off and then started my entrepreneurial journey. I started different companies. This is my third company. The other two were in consulting and real estate. This company is more on the enterprise product side. I started this in 2008 but 2007 was when I started having this idea of masking and protecting people’s data because that was being lost or shared in many ways. That was the start of my journey. I had a couple of co-founders with me. One of them left and the other is still with me. Initially, I raised $900,000 after six months in business.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to 2008. What was going on around you that triggered the thought process of what you decided to do?

Manmeet Singh: As I told you, I had a consulting company. At that point, I was consulting with large corporations in New York and some being corporations on the West Coast. I realized that I had access to all customers’ and employee’s data within those organizations. I’m the contractor there. Why should have I access to that data even in the non-production environment?

I talked to their senior people and asked them. They had no answer for it. They said, “We’re trying to protect everything around so nobody unauthorized can come in.” I said, “I could be a black sheep and I could take away all the data. What are you going to do about it?” There was no way of tracking the data. There is no way to know who took the data. They really had no answer.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise
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