1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2018: Adya, San Francisco, CA

Adya is a SaaS data security platform that helps enterprises manage and secure their SaaS apps. It helps Google’s G Suite admins to get visibility into what data has been exposed, what third-party apps have been installed along with their degree of risk, which external users have access to internal data, and which internal users have been exposing data. It also helps fix such security threats and mishaps with a few clicks and tweaks in policies.

Adya was founded in 2016 by CEO Deepak Balakrishna and was later joined by his Co-Founder and CTO Amit Agarwal. Deepak has over 21 years of experience in product and marketing roles in the US at enterprise storage, application and networking companies Druva, Riverbed, and Sun. Deepak has degrees from UC Berkeley, Cornell and National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, India. Amit is a graduate of IIT Guwahati and has over 15 years’ experience in product and technology roles at O9, Pine Labs, and Dassault Systems.

While working, especially at Druva, Deepak realized that in this age where all data is moving to the cloud, companies are losing visibility into sensitive data and are constantly wondering who is accessing the data and who has access to critical data. Traditional security defences like firewalls and VPNs are not effective against insider attacks as the attacker is already in the network – either as a malicious employee or an employee whose credentials have been compromised. While cloud apps like G Suite and O365 make it easy to collaborate, it is very easy to expose data carelessly (or maliciously) without the knowledge of IT admins. As the number of SaaS apps increases, this problem will grow exponentially. Adya was started to address this problem domain.

This nascent market, called “Cloud Office Management Tools” by Gartner, is focused on bringing order and control to the proliferation of SaaS applications by having a single console to manage, set policies, get visibility across, and secure multiple applications.

The leader and pioneer in this market is BetterCloud, which has so far raised $110 million. A slew of startups are coming up. Some other examples include Alpin.io that has raised $2 million and Intello that recently raised $1.3 million.

Currently, the company is shipping the product and has customers and revenue.

Its list price is $2/user/month, which works out to $200 per month for a company with 100 employees.

Adya focuses on the mid-market and the new breed of “cloud only” companies, i.e. companies with less than 500 employees who are using SaaS applications such as G Suite, Slack, Jira, etc. The company has pivoted to the current somewhat broader positioning from its earlier target market of mid-market companies with less than 1000 employees.

Over time as the company adds more SaaS connectors to Slack, Office 365, Box, Jira etc., and as more companies move to become cloud-only, Adya plans to target larger enterprises that mainly use O365.

Using a bottom-up approach, it expects the Total Available Market to be around $2 billion for the mid-market companies in the US and Europe. After two or three years, when it plans to focus on large enterprises worldwide, it expects the TAM to increase to $5 billion.

Initially, the company was bootstrapped. The founders had spent about $80k including $35k from each of the founders and a $10k convertible note at $5 million cap. Currently, the company is angel-funded with up to $220,000 and has a small six-person team.

Over the next few months, as the company adds more product offerings and customers, it is looking to raise a pre-Series A offering around July 2018. The ideal investor is one who is passionate about this space, has experience with B2B SaaS companies, opens the doors for them, especially for prospects, and guides them as a long-term partner.

This segment is a part in the series : 1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2018