Bootstrapping an AI-Powered Security Startup to $10M+ in Revenue: Osprey Security CEO Rohit Anabheri (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Did you have a customer with whom you validated this with?

Rohit Anabheri: This has been my mantra. Find your customer. Know their problems and fix their problems. We did it very organically. We knew what the gaps were. Then what we did is documented them and went to the people to validate.

Sramana Mitra: Who are these people?

Rohit Anabheri: We built a council. These are potential customers.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find these people?

Rohit Anabheri: Based on our personal relationships.

Sramana Mitra: You had people who were familiar with the problem that you were trying to go after, and you brought them together.

Rohit Anabheri: Not just that. Once we started engaging them, we figured out new problems. There were existing problems that we were aware of. There were problems that we weren’t aware of. The biggest challenge is the discovery of sensitive data. Once you discover the data, you can put as many layers as possible to protect that.

One of the biggest challenges is discovering the data. That was one of the enlightening things that we found. Discovering data is critical. This is true for any system or organization located in multiple scales and multiple countries with thousands of branches and banks or any organization. One other thing that we did is sensitive data discovery. It’s one of the first things that we introduced to the market.

Sramana Mitra: This problem that you identified and went after, did you do that in the critical infrastructure domain?

Rohit Anabheri: This includes critical infrastructure.

Sramana Mitra: But not only critical infrastructure?

Rohit Anabheri: Yes, beyond that. Enterprises are struggling to know exactly where their inventory is. They may have thousands of network devices or systems that are not documented in a central location. The second problem is what kind of data do those systems have. Let’s take an employee who has moved to another business unit but has lingering sensitive information in the previous business unit.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. How did your background as a services company builder kick in gear? Did you have a product or did you just take services projects?

Rohit Anabheri: If you look at my background, I started as a services company. I always find ways to build things better or more efficiently. As part of that process, I built some IP. I decided that the only way for us to be able to protect our identity and build upon it is building something tangible.

Time and again throughout my career, I looked for efficient ways to solve things and be able to patent them. I continue that approach. When we started building, we look at what are the IP that we can build based on the current challenges.

Sramana Mitra: What were the early client relationships structured as? Were they services deals? In our program, we have learned that one of the tried and true methods of starting up is bootstrapping a product company using services.

I think that’s what you’re describing where you have this ability to identify problems, get customer intimacy, solve problems in a services context, develop IP, and then productize it.

Rohit Anabheri: That is correct. It’s a natural progression in terms of how this happened. Based on our engagement and the knowledge that we had, we were able to build on top of it. We figured out that this is something that no one is doing. Why don’t we wrap it around an IP and go to market?

Sramana Mitra: It works. A lot of successful entrepreneurs have done it.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping an AI-Powered Security Startup to $10M+ in Revenue: Osprey Security CEO Rohit Anabheri
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