1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2017: Adya, San Francisco, CA

Adya is a SaaS data security platform that helps companies protect their data from insider attacks and ransomware, which is a problem seen in more than 70% of enterprises. It helps companies detect where their most sensitive data is, protects it from overexposure, and sends alerts in case of misuse or theft.

Adya was founded in 2016 by CEO Deepak Balakrishna and CTO Pradeep Das. Deepak has over 20 years of experience in product and marketing roles in the US at enterprise storage, application and networking companies Druva, Riverbed, and Sun. Pradeep has over 10 years’ experience in the Big Data space at HP, IBM, Oracle, StatX, and Instantis, which was acquired by Oracle.

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 defenses 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. Adya was started to address this problem domain.

The market leader for this type of data access governance and alerting is Varonis (NASDAQ: VRNS) which has annual revenue of $164.5 million and market cap of $1.13 billion while STEALTHbits is a smaller player. They are focused on on-premises data sets and are on-premises solutions. Adya’s main differentiation is that it offers a cloud native solution with support for both cloud and on-premises data sources for the underserved mid-market companies.

Currently, the company has an MVP in initial trials and is in the pre-revenue stage.

Its list price is $3/user/month, which works out to $300 per month for a company with 100 employees.

Adya focuses on the mid-market, i.e. companies with less than 1000 employees and with a lot of distributed data and a strong need to get better visibility into data. The top verticals are Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC), Healthcare, Legal, Oil and Gas and Utilities.

The company wants to start with a niche vertical like AEC for supporting data sources and providing audit and visibility functionality. It hopes this will give it quick wins that it can leverage with related verticals like finance and health. It will then add more security focused features that will allow it to support more verticals/use cases and increase the ASP.

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.

Currently, the company is bootstrapped and has a small six-person team. The founders have spent about $80k including $35k from each of the founders and a $10k convertible note at $5 million cap.

The company is looking to raise $300k from individual angels or seed-stage micro VCs. 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 2017