1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2020: SecurelyShare, Bengaluru, India

The global data governance market is expected to grow from $1.8 billion in 2019 to $4.8 billion by 2024 at a CAGR of 21.5%. With privacy laws getting more stringent across the globe, organizations are struggling to have a unified approach for the different requirements across different regions towards data security, data privacy, and data governance. SecurelyShare with its patented platform DSG Vault is uniquely positioned in this market.

SecurelyShare was founded in July 2017 by Prakash Baskaran. Prakash is a serial entrepreneur who had earlier founded five startups including Pawaa Software that had focused on Information Rights Management (IRM) and providing security and controls for files and documents. Founded in 2007, Pawaa was acquired by Cisco in 2015.    

Following the acquisition of Pawaa, the IRM space had consolidated and the number of players had reduced to a handful. Prakash realized that business and sensitive data are mixed and scattered in the enterprise environment at most organizations. They were struggling to have a unified Data Security Governance framework to remain compliant and competitive. At the same time, the market was expanding into Open Data and Open Banking. He set up SecurelyShare to go beyond simply securing the data to embed appropriate access controls, usage policies, and consent at the dataset level. This allows data to be consumed without abuse, digital transformation without sacrificing data privacy, and data consumption as per compliance requirements.

Its patented platform DSG Vault can process enormous amounts of data and make it available for digital transformation, innovation, and analytics. It can integrate with any enterprise or cloud application to discover/separate the sensitive data to treat them differently from the business and the transaction data. It extends a rich set of APIs to store, get reference numbers, set policies, look up policies, and enforce access controls.

The main differentiating aspect of DSG Vault is that it has seven patents. Its patented technology embeds data with security, consent, policies and access controls. It enables organizations to monetize data and works at the dataset level and not externally like the competition. It provides a dashboard, alerts, notifications, and an inbuilt Incident Management.

Initially, SecurelyShare successfully mapped the capabilities of DSG Vault with Aadhaar guidelines and RBI guidelines for the Indian market. It then started conversations with multiple private, mid to small banks. It also looked at employee privacy and mapped it to various global guidelines. It has integrated DSG Vault in the OEM model with several partners. Notably Ascent HR, an Indian payroll company with 900 customers in 37 countries has gone live with three of its enterprise customers. It helped Ascent demonstrate that the PII data of employees are stored and retrieved as per the local privacy laws and regulations. These interactions helped it consolidate product-market fit, define large use case categories, define an entry point into an organization, and define a value proposition for the partners.

SecurelyShare competes primarily with Very Good Security (VGS), which was recently acquired by Visa. Other primary competitors include BigID, OneTrust, and TrustArc. There are several players in the categories of data discovery, data classification, DLP, CASB, IRM, data tokenization, data masking, encryption, privacy management, and GRC solutions.

SecurelyShare’s biggest target market globally is BFSI, a heavily regulated market but also an early adopter of technology. Pharmaceuticals, IT/ITES, high tech, retail are additional target segments. Since it provides a horizontal solution, any industry that has to deal with sensitive, critical, and Personally identifiable information (PII) data can be its target customer.

SecurelyShare depends on OEM partnerships for 75% of customer acquisitions, System Integrators for 15% and Direct Sales for 10%. It charges a monthly subscription fee of $12,000 for 5 certified applications to connect with the DSG Vault platform. Beyond five applications, there is an additional fee of $3000 per application per month. In the OEM model, pricing is per user per month and per transaction fee is also applicable.

Using a bottom-up approach, the company expects its TAM to be $54.8M in India and $897.6M in the US.

The company has started generating revenue and expects to achieve profitability in September 2020. Its monthly run rate for expenses is $100k. Once the lockdown ends, SecurelyShare expects to have a run rate of $1 M in annual revenues. Three mid-size private banks have completed the pilot and are ready to implement the solution once the lockdown ends.  One bank has already gone live with the solution.

SecurelyShare’s vision is to embed DSG Vault at the application level, more like “Intel Inside” and grow through OEM partnerships. They will begin integration with various well-established enterprise, SaaS and infrastructure applications, APIs, and developer network and marketplace. System integrators will also play a big role in their growth strategy as they try to bring DSG Vault to the organizational level for home grown applications.

SecurelyShare was self-funded with $2.5M of Prakash’s savings. The company graduated from NetApp accelerator.  It is a Global Alliance Partner of Netapp and is actively working with their India and Australia sales team to take the integrated product to the market. Technology Development Board, a funding arm of the Department of Science and Technology, India, has provided a soft loan of $1M.

The company is planning to raise $10M toward the end of 2020 for global expansion and is currently planning to do a $2M pre-series A round. Its ideal investor would help with the OEM strategy and global expansion. The company is also seeking partnerships with larger Cyber Security players with existing channels into its target customer segments.

This segment is a part in the series : 1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2020