[Funding alert] Cybersecurity startup CloudSEK raises $7M in Series A led by MassMutual Ventures

CloudSEK - an artificial Intelligence (AI)-based digital risk management and cybersecurity platform provider on Wednesday has raised $7 million (~Rs 50 crores) in its Series A round led by MassMutual Ventures. The latest round takes the total amount raised by the platform to ~$10 million.

The round also saw participation from Omidyar Network India, 100X Entrepreneur, individual investors Firoz Meeran and Navas Meeran (Group Meeran), and CRED founder Kunal, Naresh Shah’s QED Innovation Labs. Existing investors Exfinity Venture Partners, IDFC Parampara, and StartupXseed Ventures also participated in this round of Investment.

The Singapore headquartered startup will use the current round of funding to accelerate CloudSEK's sales and marketing efforts across Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and North America. CloudSEK will also ramp up its research and development to combat the increasingly sophisticated global threat landscape.

Speaking to YourStory, cybersecurity expert Rahul Sasi, Founder and Chairman, CloudSEK said the fresh capital will also be used to double the company's headcount, specially with a lot of engineering focus. Currently the startup has over 100 employees.

Predicting Cyber Threats

Founded in 2015 Rahul Sasi, CloudSEK predict cyber-attacks, even before they occur, by leveraging its AI platform.

Given the growing complexity of cyber-attacks, and their far-reaching impact, CloudSEK continuously evolves its flagship digital risk monitoring platform XVigil. XVigil currently caters to organizations across verticals, including some of the world’s top banks, technology companies, healthcare organizations, and retail giants such as ICICI, NPCI, CRED, Sun Pharma, Reliance, Tokopedia, OLA cabs, and Decathlon.

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CloudSEK has also recently launched the world’s first security search engine BeVigil, which allows users, developers, and researchers to evaluate the security of their applications. BeVigil is currently free to use and has 10,000+ users and 400+ corporate accounts. With significant community interest, the platform is adding 1000+ unique users per month, states the company.

Business model and revenue

Earlier the company was operating in B2B model with their XVigil product. With the BeVigil launch which is B2C, they have customers signing up from all over the world. They have customers from 20+ countries.

“Since our last funding, we have enjoyed accelerating adoption of CloudSEK XVigil across APAC, Middle East, and North America. Marquee anchor customers in each region, coupled with our extremely high customer satisfaction rates, have allowed us to consolidate our presence in these regions. We have seen great results with our "Remote First'' go-to-market approach, which we refined and perfected during the pandemic. We intend to use the new funding to rapidly scale up this approach globally and quickly expand to new markets. The participation of all our investors, in the latest round, is a validation of our approach and direction,” said Sourabh Issar, CEO of CloudSEK.

With the growing customer base, the company will be touching close to 3 million ARR by this financial year.

“CloudSEK is addressing a growing demand for automated assessment, classification and remediation of cyber threats and for transforming large scale security teams to an agile threat centric approach. The platform’s ability to monitor and manage threats and infrastructure at the enterprise level is world class. We are very excited to partner with Rahul, Sourabh and team on their vision to build the leading AI-enabled platform for cybersecurity,” said Anvesh Ramineni, Managing Director at MassMutual Ventures.

"We are delighted to see the continued growth of CloudSEK that validates its strengths as a global cybersecurity company out of South Asia. The ever-increasing need for Cybersecurity coupled with the shortage of skilled resources, is further accentuating the demand for security threat prediction capabilities that CloudSEK brings to the table, " said Chinnu Senthilkumar, Managing Partner and CTO, Exfinity Ventures.