Cyber security start-up PingSafe announces raising $3.3 mn in seed funding

Company aims to serve cloud security-related organisational needs for customers

PingSafe, a cybersecurity start-up that detects technology vulnerabilities for companies, announced it has raised $3.3 million in seed funding.

The funding round was led by led by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India), with participation from angel investors that included Rahul Chari (co-founder and CTO, PhonePe), Neeraj Arora (ex-CBO, WhatsApp), Saurya Prakash (cofounder, Recko), Vivek Ramachandran (founder, SquareX), Gaurav Agarwal (cofounder and CTO, Tata 1mg), and Tanglin Ventures.

PingSafe was founded by Anand Prakash and Nishant Mittal, ethical hackers who have found vulnerabilities at companies like Uber, Meta, and Twitter. The company focuses on cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) and aims to be a one-stop shop for all cloud security-related organisational needs, it said in a statement.

“Having discovered thousands of critical vulnerabilities in leading companies, we understand the mindset of hackers. At PingSafe, we incorporate this unique perspective into our CNAPP platform by adding capabilities like the Offensive Security Engine that identify the most critical vulnerabilities,” said Anand Prakash, founder and chief executive officer of PingSafe.

PingSafe said its revenue has grown ten times since last year and it has also quadrupled its customer base. Its customers include Flipkart, Razorpay, Near Intelligence Inc., Ujjivan Bank, Skyflow, and SBI General Insurance.

According to Kroll, 59 per cent of businesses in 2022 in Asia-Pacific reported being the victim of a cyberattack. Although security expenditure has increased to prevent misconfigurations within organisations, cyberattacks have become increasingly frequent and sophisticated, with attackers utilising multiple individual vulnerabilities to compromise systems. This highlights a clear need for a platform that combines not only multiple capabilities in a single solution but also imitates novel attacks on an organisation’s cloud infrastructure to highlight the most severe issues for the security team to address first.