Primeauth: Reinventing Cyber Security
7 years ago Shalini B
P B Surya Subhash’s relentless pursuit to innovate made him do an extensive market research and being an ethical hacker himself, his obvious choice was to do something related to Information Security. His innovative mind and extensive research led to the birth of Primeauth – a cyber security service startup based out of Hyderabad co – founded by 2 young hackers with a vision to provide innovative path breaking solutions to ground breaking problems.
Birth of the startup
During Surya’s research, he identified couple of problems and when he was in the initial stages of his Idea, he happened to discuss the problems with his co – founder, Kaushik Bharadwaj. There on, they had series of discussions that productively resulted in refinement of the idea and one day, they decided to work on it together. That’s how it all started. Initially the duo got huge blows from the industry and some even mocked their personalities saying it’s useless for anyone to do something. Instead of giving up, both of them sat and refined their idea, pivoted the strategies and their hard work paid off. They call themselves ‘planned entrepreneurs instead of ‘accidental entrepreneurs’.
About the startup
Primeauth’s product Nimble is India’s first authentication as a service product. It is aimed at providing user friendly, affordable and secure form of authentication for developers and organizations to securely verify their users. They let organizations verify their users based on the user behaviour. Currently they are providing a stable, accurate way of verifying users based on their Key Typing behaviour.
The USP of this startup is the way they provide organizations a more secure way for a lesser cost. Any biometrics require additional hardware and that costs organizations. The team is aiming at providing cost effective, hardware less biometrics coupled with superior taste of security.
The adoption of this form of authentication remains 100% and when it comes to other forms of authentication, it has been proven to be 6.5% and the choice is very clear.
The adoption of this form of authentication remains 100% and when it comes to other forms of authentication, it has been proven to be 6.5% and the choice is very clear.
The Eureka Moment
“Well, I’m that ‘Mommy ka Ladla’ Kid as in every house who is responsible for all the bank accounts and FIntech accounts my mom possess. Whenever she wanted to do some transaction, she pulled me off from whatever I would be doing and asked me to do that. I had to reset the password every single time because she forgets her complex password. The reason for that was I forced her to use a unique password for every single application. Since I’m a hacker I know the harmful consequences of reusing the same password everywhere. Do we all use a unique password for every application we use? Surveys clearly say we don’t and there’s a problem. Also the adoption to Multi Factor Authentication which is supposed to save the user from password reuse and a couple of other problems is as less as 6.5% and this clearly shows how the current ‘so-called’ authentication companies have failed to deliver a perfect solution. We want to increase the adoption to MFA at the organizations shouldn’t feel over burdened by the cost or have the burden of losing users because of complex authentication process. Henceforth, we found a problem and came up with the world’s most adaptive, cost effective biometrics product ‘Nimble’. “Says the proud co – founder, Surya Subhash.
The team
Mr. P B Surya Subhash is a 20 year old computer science undergrad from Hyderabad, security researcher and ethical hacker who found security issues in more than 200+ MNC’s like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and also found security loop holes in renowned organizations/institutions like Ministry of Security and Justice, Netherlands, National Informatics Centre of India and USA.GOV. He also published 2 International research papers and an avid lover of Open Source. He is a Ruby and iOS developer with a year of experience in Full Stack programming and half a decade security experience, he is also a contributor at several meetup groups including Google Developer Group Hyderabad, Duck Duck Go Hyderabad, Null Hyderabad and a couple of other meetup groups in and around Hyderabad.
On the other hand, Kaushik Bharadwaj is an Android & Rails Developer by day and a security researcher by night.He is 20 year old who is currently a computer science student. He has successfully built and contributed to various Open Source applications, libraries, themes and Android roms, which have more than a million users, combined. He has also found security issues in websites of Telsa, Zendesk, Indeed, Magento, Silent Circle and many more. He also acclaims to be an avid contributor to many communities like Google Developer Group Hyderabad and Null Hyderabad.
The team of 5 comprising mostly of students and hackers is currently bootstrapped and is looking for an investor who’d add value to their product not only in terms of money, but also by mentoring them in aligning the product. They say ‘we are specific about mentorship, money is secondary’
Current and Future Plans
Currently, the startup is categorized under advanced authentication sector in Identity and Access Management Vertical which has a market size of $8 Billion as of now and is expected to go up to $ 14 Billion by 2021. The business model is as simple as any other SaaS model is, Tier based pricing which scales with their clients usage and they also offer licensing and value added reseller plans.
In the coming days, the team aims at providing cost effective yet superior grade security. They are working on something super exciting, which they do not want to reveal it yet.
But readers, be sure to check out their official website as they say they’ve got something which they say will be worth waiting for.
The duo recently won first prize in Z Nation Lab’s Khoj 2017, Hyderabad on 21st March at T-Hub and Best Student software product award at the 25th HYSEA Awards on 23rd March.
