1Mby1M Deal Radar 2021: SecurelyShare, Bengaluru, India

SecurelyShare is a bootstrapped company with a deep focus on Data Security, Data Governance, and Data Privacy. It provides enterprises a dedicated platform for managing customer data privacy. Founded in 2017, the company has seven US patents and has already booked $1M in ARR.

SecurelyShare was founded by Prakash Baskaran, a serial entrepreneur who had earlier founded five startups. One of them was an Information Rights Management (IRM) startup called Pawaa Software that was acquired by Cisco in 2015.    

With the introduction of data privacy laws like GDPR, CCAP, and PDP Bill, there was an unmet need for privacy automation, secure data sharing, and privacy enabled computing. There are several players operating in the current landscape to secure, enforce consent, and demonstrate compliance, but all these products operate in silos. SecurelyShare competes with new age players like BigID, OneTrust, TrustArc, and Securiti.ai.

Most products in the market look at Data Privacy and Data Security as two different aspects of enterprise. Existing data security products are generally focused on theft or attack only, but data privacy tech solutions guard against loss and misuse of PI/PII/SPI data. For enterprises moving towards Digital Transformation to create faster products while taking care of the various privacy requirements, SecurelyShare believes organizations should have a Unified Data Centric approach.

SecurelyShare platform offers Data Privacy Officers and Chief Information Security Officers complete visibility into the state of customer data privacy. It offers identification of any kind of personal data or sensitive personal data anywhere from on-premise, cloud and hybrid environments applications/tools which helps organizations identify, manage risk, and maintain consistent policies for PI/PII/SPI data.

Its platform provides the technological capabilities for a comprehensive privacy program in an organization with a rich set of APIs, connectors to popularly used third party applications, and AI/ML engine for data discovery, data classification, data correlation, and privacy automation. It offers solutions for Data Encryption, Data Tokenization, Data Masking, Data Control Service, and Monitoring and Auditing.

Initially, SecurelyShare gained traction by successfully mapping the capabilities of SecurelyShare platform with Aadhaar guidelines and RBI guidelines for the Indian market. This helped it start conversations with multiple private, mid to small banks. It also looked at employee privacy and mapped it to various global guidelines. One of its early wins was Ascent HR, a mid-tier payroll company for global companies. In the past three months, it has on-boarded over eight paying customers on the Data Security part of its platform.

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 can be its target customer.

Although the current release of its data privacy tech platform considers PDP Bill requirements as the base guidelines and is geared for Indian organizations, its platform can be easily extended to meet other data privacy regulations requirements like GDPR, CCPA, etc.

SecurelyShare has a comprehensive pricing model for direct sales, partner driven or OEM sales model. It charges a monthly subscription fee of $12,000 for five certified applications to connect with the platform. Beyond five applications, there is an additional fee of $3000 per connector per month. In the OEM model, pricing is per user per month and per transaction fee is also applicable as the OEM model tends to serve only one use case at a time.

Cyber Security Venture estimates global Cyber Security Spending to reach $1 trillion by 2021 with 12-15% growth with Data Security accounting for the largest share. Large Financial institutions in the US are estimated to have budgets north of $600 million per year, with an average spend on cyber security of $2300 per employee. Using these parameters and assuming 5% large enterprises in the US, 4% of mid-size enterprises, and 2% of SMEs, SecurelyShare expects TAM for its Data Security Governance products to be around $900M.

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. It has won two stages of Cyber Security Grand Challenge in India and a Nasscom Emerge 50 award. 

Despite the slowdown due to COVID, SecurelyShare expects to maintain a run rate of $1M in annual revenues based on the current bookings and a strong pipeline. The company is currently planning to do a $2.5M pre-Series A round. Its ideal investor would help with its OEM strategy and global expansion.

This segment is a part in the series : 1Mby1M Deal Radar 2021