India’s data security landscape has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past few years, evolving from a market heavily dependent on foreign solutions to a thriving ecosystem of homegrown innovation. As we navigate through 2026, the urgency surrounding data protection has reached unprecedented levels, driven by increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, stringent regulatory requirements including India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, and the exponential growth of digital transformation across every sector of the economy. The convergence of these forces has created fertile ground for a new generation of Software-as-a-Service startups that are reimagining how organizations protect their most valuable asset: their data.
1. Druva: The Cloud Data Protection Pioneer
Druva stands as India’s only unicorn in the cybersecurity space, having achieved a valuation of two billion dollars following its one hundred forty-seven million dollar funding round in 2021. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Pune with significant operations in Silicon Valley, Druva has built its success on a fundamentally different approach to data protection that fully embraces cloud-native architecture rather than attempting to adapt legacy backup technologies for cloud environments. The company’s SaaS platform delivers comprehensive data protection, cyber resilience, and governance capabilities across endpoint devices, data centers, and cloud workloads, serving more than four thousand customers globally including enterprises like Pfizer, Marriott International, and NASA.
Druva’s core innovation centers on what it calls the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, a platform that eliminates the complexity and cost of traditional backup infrastructure by delivering everything as a service. Unlike conventional approaches that require organizations to deploy and manage backup servers, storage systems, and complex software installations, Druva’s cloud-native architecture means customers simply install lightweight agents on the systems they want to protect, with all data securely transmitted to Druva’s cloud infrastructure where deduplication, encryption, and storage occur automatically. This approach dramatically reduces the total cost of ownership compared to traditional solutions while providing superior protection against ransomware attacks, which have become one of the most significant threats facing organizations worldwide.
The platform’s ransomware protection capabilities leverage machine learning to detect anomalous data changes that might indicate encryption by malware, automatically creating immutable snapshots that cannot be altered or deleted even if attackers gain administrative access to customer environments. When ransomware strikes, organizations can restore their data from these protected snapshots, recovering operations in hours rather than the weeks that manual recovery from backup tapes might require. This cyber resilience focus has proven particularly valuable in recent years as ransomware attacks have evolved from indiscriminate infections to targeted campaigns against specific organizations willing and able to pay substantial ransoms.
Beyond backup and recovery, Druva provides data governance capabilities that help organizations understand what sensitive information they possess, where it resides, and who has access to it. These capabilities prove essential for compliance with privacy regulations including GDPR, CCPA, and India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, which impose significant obligations on organizations to protect personal information and respond to individual rights requests. Druva’s ability to search across all backed-up data, identify specific categories of information, and enable selective deletion or preservation addresses requirements that would be extremely difficult to meet manually across distributed IT environments.
The company’s success in the global market demonstrates that Indian startups can build enterprise-grade platforms that compete directly with established vendors. Druva’s customer base spans industries from financial services and healthcare to manufacturing and retail, with deployments protecting petabytes of data across hundreds of thousands of endpoints and servers. This proven scalability and reliability position Druva as the benchmark against which other Indian data security startups measure themselves.
2. Seclore: The Enterprise Data-Centric Security Specialist
Seclore has carved a distinctive niche in data security through its focus on data-centric protection, an approach that addresses a fundamental limitation of traditional security models that focus on protecting network perimeters and endpoints while leaving data itself vulnerable once accessed by authorized users. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Mumbai, Seclore has raised over fifty million dollars across multiple funding rounds and serves more than two thousand organizations globally including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and professional services firms where protecting intellectual property and confidential information represents a competitive imperative.
The company’s core technology implements what security professionals call information rights management, enabling organizations to define and enforce policies that control how sensitive documents and data can be used regardless of where they travel. When a user attempts to access a Seclore-protected file, the platform authenticates their identity, verifies their authorization level, and then enforces granular controls that might prevent printing, copying, forwarding, or even taking screenshots of the information. These protections persist even after files leave organizational boundaries, traveling in emails, shared through cloud storage, or accessed on personal devices, addressing the reality that modern work increasingly occurs outside traditional security perimeters.
Seclore’s approach proves particularly valuable for organizations in industries like pharmaceuticals, aerospace, financial services, and legal where protecting confidential information from both external threats and insider risks represents a constant challenge. A pharmaceutical company developing a new drug can use Seclore to ensure that clinical trial data, manufacturing specifications, and regulatory submissions remain protected as they flow between internal researchers, external contract research organizations, regulatory agencies, and manufacturing partners. The platform enables collaboration while maintaining control, tracking every access and use of protected information while preventing unauthorized disclosure that could compromise competitive advantage or violate regulatory requirements.
The technical architecture integrates with existing enterprise systems including Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, email platforms, and cloud storage services, providing protection without disrupting existing workflows or forcing users to adopt new tools. This integration-first approach addresses one of the fundamental challenges in deploying security solutions, namely that technologies which create friction or inconvenience for users are frequently circumvented or ignored, undermining their effectiveness. Seclore’s transparent operation means that authorized users can work with protected information as they normally would, with security controls operating invisibly in the background.
Recent enhancements to the platform incorporate machine learning capabilities that analyze how users interact with data, identify patterns that might indicate data exfiltration attempts or insider threats, and provide security teams with risk insights that enable proactive intervention. This evolution from pure access control to intelligent monitoring and analytics reflects the broader trend in security toward systems that not only enforce policies but also identify and respond to suspicious behavior before it results in actual data loss.
3. Safe Security: The Cyber Risk Quantification Leader
Safe Security, formerly known as Lucideus, represents the new generation of data security companies that approach protection not as a purely technical challenge but as a business risk management problem requiring quantification and continuous measurement. Founded by CEO Saket Modi, Safe Security raised a landmark seventy million dollar Series C funding round in 2024 led by major investors including Cisco Investments and John Chambers, the former CEO of Cisco Systems. This substantial investment, which values the company at over three hundred million dollars, reflects growing recognition that enterprises need better ways to understand and communicate cybersecurity risks in business terms that executives and boards can act upon.
The company’s SAFE platform delivers what it calls cyber risk quantification, using artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze an organization’s entire digital attack surface including cloud infrastructure, on-premises systems, third-party vendors, and employee behaviors to calculate a numerical cyber risk score. This score, expressed in financial terms representing potential losses from successful attacks, enables executives to make informed decisions about security investments by understanding the actual business impact of different risk scenarios. Rather than overwhelming decision-makers with technical jargon about vulnerabilities and patches, Safe Security translates complex security postures into clear metrics that can be compared against risk tolerance levels and used to prioritize remediation efforts.
The platform operates on what Safe Security calls a “signal-based” architecture, continuously monitoring over three thousand signals across an organization’s environment to detect changes that affect risk levels. When developers deploy new applications, when employees access sensitive data from unusual locations, when cloud configurations change, or when new vulnerabilities are discovered in systems the organization uses, the platform automatically recalculates risk scores and notifies relevant stakeholders. This continuous, automated monitoring addresses the reality that modern IT environments change constantly, with new systems deployed, old ones decommissioned, and configurations modified daily in ways that can inadvertently introduce security gaps.
Safe Security’s focus on the financial impact of cyber risk resonates particularly strongly with boards of directors and C-suite executives who increasingly recognize cybersecurity as a critical business issue but struggle to evaluate the effectiveness of security programs or compare security investments against other business priorities. The platform provides the quantitative foundation for these strategic conversations, enabling organizations to allocate security budgets based on actual risk reduction rather than compliance checkboxes or vendor fear-mongering. This business-aligned approach has driven rapid adoption, with the company now serving over five hundred enterprise customers globally across financial services, healthcare, retail, and technology sectors.
4. CloudSEK: The AI-Powered Threat Intelligence Platform
CloudSEK has established itself as a leader in predictive cyber threat intelligence, using artificial intelligence to detect and anticipate attack chains before they fully form and impact organizations. Founded in 2015 by CEO Rahul Sasi and headquartered in Bengaluru, CloudSEK has raised over thirty-two million dollars including a recent ten million dollar Series B2 round that made it the first Indian-origin cybersecurity company to receive investment from a United States state fund, specifically Connecticut Innovations. This milestone reflects the company’s successful expansion into the American market and the growing recognition of Indian cybersecurity innovation on the global stage.
The company’s XVigil platform continuously monitors the surface web, deep web, and dark web alongside organizational assets including infrastructure, code repositories, and domains to surface early threat signals before they materialize into actual attacks. CloudSEK processes over thirty-seven gigabytes of data daily through machine learning pipelines that identify patterns indicating potential threats. The platform might detect leaked employee credentials being sold on dark web forums, exposed application programming interfaces that could provide attackers with unauthorized access, suspicious social media posts suggesting planned attacks against the organization, or brand impersonations designed to deceive customers. These early warning signals enable security teams to take preemptive action, changing compromised credentials, closing exposed access points, or alerting law enforcement before damage occurs.
This predictive approach represents a fundamental shift from reactive security models that focus on detecting and responding to attacks after they have begun. By identifying the reconnaissance, weaponization, and delivery phases of attack chains while they are still in progress, CloudSEK provides organizations with the opportunity to disrupt attacks before they reach their targets. In an era where successful breaches can cost millions in remediation, regulatory fines, and reputational damage, this prevention-focused approach delivers substantial value that traditional security tools focused on perimeter defense or endpoint protection cannot match.
CloudSEK serves over three hundred global enterprises spanning banking, healthcare, technology, and government sectors. The platform’s ability to monitor threats across multiple languages and regional contexts proves particularly valuable for organizations operating internationally, as cybercriminal activity increasingly originates from diverse geographic locations requiring cultural and linguistic understanding to properly interpret. The recent strategic partnership with Seed Group, affiliated with Sheikh Saeed bin Ahmed Al Maktoum’s Private Office, to deliver predictive cyber intelligence across the Middle East demonstrates CloudSEK’s expanding global footprint and the universal applicability of its threat intelligence approach.
5. Sequretek: The Automated Threat Detection Innovator
Sequretek has built its reputation on bringing artificial intelligence and automation to endpoint security and threat detection, addressing the reality that modern enterprises cannot possibly review the millions of security events generated daily by their infrastructure without intelligent systems that separate genuine threats from noise. Founded in 2013 and based in Bengaluru, Sequretek provides two flagship products that work together to deliver comprehensive protection.
The Endpoint Detection, Protection, and Response platform continuously monitors devices including laptops, desktops, and servers for suspicious activity, using machine learning to identify behavior patterns that indicate malware infections, unauthorized access attempts, or data exfiltration. The Security Operations Center platform aggregates security events from across an organization’s environment, applies analytics to identify high-priority incidents requiring investigation, and provides automated response capabilities that can contain threats before they spread.
The company’s differentiation stems from its focus on automation rather than simply providing more data for overwhelmed security teams to analyze. Traditional security information and event management systems often generate thousands of alerts daily, the vast majority of which represent false positives or low-severity events that do not warrant immediate attention. Security analysts spending their days investigating these alerts suffer from alert fatigue, potentially missing the genuinely dangerous incidents buried in the noise. Sequretek’s artificial intelligence reduces alert volumes by up to ninety-five percent by automatically triaging events, investigating low-level alerts through automated playbooks, and only escalating to human analysts those incidents that truly require expert judgment.
This intelligent automation proves particularly valuable for organizations that lack large security teams with specialized expertise. Small and medium enterprises, regional banks, healthcare facilities, and educational institutions face the same sophisticated threats as Fortune 500 companies but typically cannot afford to staff twenty-four-seven security operations centers with expensive security analysts. Sequretek’s platform effectively provides enterprise-grade security capabilities at a price point and staffing model that mid-market organizations can sustain, democratizing access to advanced threat detection and response that was previously available only to the largest enterprises.
The platform integrates with existing security tools and infrastructure, enriching rather than replacing organizations’ current investments. Integration with firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, email security gateways, and identity management platforms enables Sequretek to correlate events across different security layers, identifying attack campaigns that might appear innocuous when examining any single system in isolation but reveal clear patterns when analyzed holistically. This integration-first approach accelerates deployment and reduces the operational burden of managing yet another standalone security product.
6. Innefu Labs: The Critical Infrastructure Defender
Innefu Labs occupies a specialized position in India’s data security landscape through its focus on serving government agencies, defense organizations, and critical infrastructure operators whose security requirements exceed those of typical commercial enterprises. Founded in 2011, Innefu provides solutions designed for environments where data breaches could compromise national security, public safety, or essential services. The company’s flagship AuthShield platform delivers multi-factor authentication capabilities specifically engineered for high-security environments, going beyond the simple two-factor authentication common in commercial settings to support biometric authentication, hardware tokens, and other advanced verification methods that dramatically reduce the risk of unauthorized access.
Beyond access control, Innefu leverages artificial intelligence to provide predictive threat analytics that help security teams anticipate attacks before they occur. The platform analyzes patterns across network traffic, user behavior, system logs, and external threat intelligence sources to identify anomalies suggesting reconnaissance activities, lateral movement by attackers who have gained initial access, or data staging operations preceding exfiltration attempts. This predictive capability proves essential for organizations protecting critical infrastructure including power grids, transportation systems, and telecommunications networks where successful cyberattacks could have cascading effects impacting millions of people.
Innefu’s deep specialization in the government and defense sectors provides it with domain expertise and customer relationships that would be difficult for commercial-focused competitors to replicate. Understanding the unique threat landscape facing government agencies, including nation-state adversaries with substantial resources and sophisticated capabilities, requires different threat models and protection strategies than those appropriate for protecting retail customer data or corporate intellectual property. Innefu’s solutions incorporate this understanding, providing security appropriate to the elevated threats and catastrophic consequences associated with protecting critical national functions.
The company’s work with law enforcement agencies on digital forensics and cybercrime investigation capabilities represents another distinctive aspect of its positioning. When cyberattacks occur, Innefu’s forensic tools help investigators preserve evidence, analyze attack techniques, attribute attacks to specific threat actors, and build cases for prosecution. This investigative capability complements preventive security measures, contributing to the broader cybersecurity ecosystem by helping ensure that cybercriminals face consequences for their actions.
7. IDfy: The Identity Verification Platform
IDfy approaches data security from the perspective of identity verification and trust, recognizing that protecting sensitive information requires first establishing with certainty who is requesting access and whether they are authorized. Founded to address the identity verification challenges facing India’s rapidly digitizing economy, IDfy has built a comprehensive platform that serves over four hundred fifty enterprise customers across banking, insurance, e-commerce, telecommunications, and other sectors where establishing customer identity represents both a regulatory requirement and a fraud prevention imperative. The platform processes millions of verification requests monthly, checking government-issued identity documents, conducting background screenings, verifying employment and education credentials, and ensuring compliance with Know Your Customer regulations.
The company’s technology leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect document forgeries, identify synthetic identities created by combining real and fake information, and flag suspicious patterns that might indicate identity theft or fraud. As digital services have expanded, criminals have become increasingly sophisticated in creating convincing fake identities, using high-quality printers and image manipulation software to produce documents that can fool human reviewers. IDfy’s automated verification examines security features, validates document numbers against government databases where available, performs liveness detection during biometric capture to ensure the person presenting credentials is physically present rather than using photographs or videos, and analyzes metadata from uploaded documents to identify tampering.
Beyond initial identity verification, IDfy provides continuous monitoring services that alert organizations when verified individuals appear on sanctions lists, face criminal charges, or experience other status changes that might affect their suitability for employment or business relationships. This ongoing vigilance proves essential in regulated industries where organizations must continuously ensure that employees, customers, and business partners meet qualification requirements and do not pose risks. Financial institutions, for instance, must screen against terrorism financing lists and political exposure databases on an ongoing basis, not just at account opening.
The platform’s application programming interface-first architecture enables seamless integration into existing customer onboarding workflows, mobile applications, and enterprise systems. This integration means that identity verification occurs transparently as part of normal business processes rather than requiring separate steps or manual interventions that slow operations and create friction for users. For e-commerce platforms onboarding new sellers, fintech companies opening digital accounts, or sharing economy platforms verifying service providers, IDfy’s verification happens in seconds behind the scenes, enabling rapid onboarding while maintaining security and compliance.
8. Sprinto: The Automated Compliance Platform
Sprinto has identified a critical intersection between data security and regulatory compliance, building a platform that automates the processes organizations must follow to achieve and maintain certifications including ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA. Founded in 2020 and based in Bengaluru, Sprinto raised thirty-one point five million dollars in Series A funding in 2024, reflecting strong investor conviction in the growing market for compliance automation as organizations face increasing pressure from regulators, customers, and partners to demonstrate robust security practices through recognized certifications. The company serves primarily software-as-a-service companies and technology startups for whom security certifications represent essential sales enablers, as enterprise customers increasingly refuse to work with vendors who cannot demonstrate compliance with security standards.
The traditional approach to achieving security certifications requires months of effort coordinating across IT, security, legal, and compliance teams to document policies, implement controls, collect evidence, and prepare for audits. This labor-intensive process consumes substantial resources and diverts engineering talent from product development to compliance documentation. Sprinto automates much of this work by continuously monitoring the security controls that certifications require, automatically collecting evidence that controls are functioning correctly, maintaining up-to-date policy documentation, identifying gaps between current state and certification requirements, and providing remediation guidance. This automation reduces the time to achieve initial certification from six to nine months down to weeks or months, while also streamlining the ongoing compliance maintenance that certifications require.
The platform integrates with the cloud infrastructure services, software-as-a-service tools, and development platforms that modern technology companies use, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, GitHub, Slack, and dozens of others. These integrations enable Sprinto to automatically verify that security configurations meet certification requirements, for instance confirming that cloud storage buckets are not publicly accessible, that multi-factor authentication is enforced for privileged accounts, that software vulnerabilities are being patched within required timeframes, and that access logs are being retained for the appropriate duration. This continuous automated verification provides assurance that security controls remain effective between audits rather than requiring manual checks that might miss configuration drift or policy violations.
Sprinto’s success reflects a broader trend toward treating compliance as code rather than as separate documentation exercises disconnected from actual technical implementations. By embedding compliance monitoring directly into the infrastructure and tools that organizations use daily, Sprinto ensures that security requirements inform architecture decisions and operational practices rather than being addressed as afterthoughts once systems are already built. This shift-left approach to compliance, addressing requirements early in development lifecycles, prevents the expensive remediation that occurs when audit failures require substantial re-engineering.
9. HyperVerge: The Identity Intelligence Solution
HyperVerge has built its business around computer vision and artificial intelligence technologies that verify identities, detect fraud, and extract information from identity documents with accuracy and speed that exceed human capabilities. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Bengaluru with additional operations in the United States, HyperVerge serves financial institutions, fintech companies, cryptocurrency exchanges, and other organizations for whom identity verification represents the first line of defense against fraud and the foundation for regulatory compliance. The company’s platform processes millions of verification requests monthly across more than a hundred countries, handling diverse identity documents in multiple languages and formats.
The technical foundation combines deep learning models trained on millions of identity documents with proprietary algorithms for fraud detection. When a user submits a driver’s license, passport, or national identity card for verification, HyperVerge’s computer vision extracts all relevant information including names, dates, document numbers, and photographs. Simultaneously, the platform analyzes the document for signs of manipulation, checking for digital alterations, physical tampering, inconsistencies in fonts or layouts that might indicate forgery, and verification against templates of genuine documents from issuing authorities. Liveness detection capabilities ensure that users are physically present and not presenting photographs or pre-recorded videos, a critical safeguard against presentation attacks where fraudsters use images of legitimate document holders to impersonate them.
HyperVerge’s global reach and support for diverse document types proves particularly valuable for companies operating internationally or serving immigrant populations who may present identity documents from countries around the world. The platform’s training data encompasses identity documents from over two hundred countries and territories, enabling accurate processing regardless of language, script, or document format. This comprehensiveness eliminates the common problem where identity verification systems work well for common document types like United States driver’s licenses but fail when presented with less familiar documents from smaller nations or territories.
The company’s focus on financial services and highly regulated industries has driven continuous investment in anti-fraud capabilities that go beyond basic document verification. The platform analyzes behavioral signals during the verification process, flagging suspicious patterns like multiple verification attempts from different devices, use of virtual private networks to obscure location, or inconsistencies between stated identity and device fingerprints. These behavioral signals, combined with document analysis, provide a more complete picture of identity verification risk than either approach alone could deliver.
10. WiJungle: The Unified Network Security Gateway
WiJungle has established itself as an Indian cybersecurity success story through its unified network security gateway platform that combines multiple security functions including firewall, intrusion prevention, web filtering, and application control into a single integrated system. Founded in 2014, WiJungle serves organizations across twenty-five countries worldwide, with particular strength in sectors including hospitality, healthcare, education, banking, retail, defense, and information technology. The company’s recognition through numerous awards including National Awards from the Government of India, the Graham Bell Award from NITI Aayog, selection among the top two cybersecurity startups in DPIIT National Startup Awards, and Frost & Sullivan’s New Product Innovation Award demonstrates both its technical innovation and market impact.
The platform’s value proposition centers on simplification and integration, addressing the operational complexity that arises when organizations deploy separate products for different security functions. Traditional approaches might involve a firewall from one vendor, intrusion prevention from another, web filtering from a third, and application control from a fourth, each with separate management consoles, policy frameworks, and technical teams. This fragmentation creates operational overhead, increases the likelihood of configuration errors that create security gaps, and makes it difficult to achieve consistent security postures across distributed locations. WiJungle’s unified architecture delivers all these capabilities through a single pane of glass management interface, with integrated policy frameworks that ensure consistent security enforcement regardless of which security function examines traffic.
The platform includes capabilities specifically designed for the Indian market including support for government security mandates, compliance with data localization requirements, and integration with India-specific infrastructure. This local optimization differentiates WiJungle from international competitors whose products may not fully address Indian regulatory requirements or operational realities. At the same time, the company’s expansion across two dozen countries demonstrates that its security approach and technical architecture have universal applicability beyond just the domestic market.
WiJungle’s success in hospitality and healthcare sectors reflects its ability to address the unique security challenges these industries face. Hotels must provide guest WiFi that is simultaneously convenient and secure, protecting the hotel’s infrastructure and other guests from malware or attacks originating from compromised guest devices while complying with government requirements to log and monitor network usage for law enforcement purposes. Healthcare facilities must protect sensitive patient information while enabling the proliferation of connected medical devices that often lack robust security controls. WiJungle’s platform addresses these vertical-specific requirements through purpose-built features rather than expecting organizations to adapt generic security products to their particular needs.
The Future of India’s Data Security Innovation
As we look beyond 2026, the data security landscape in India appears poised for continued rapid evolution driven by technological advancement, regulatory expansion, and the persistent threat landscape that shows no signs of abating. Several key trends will shape the trajectory of startups in this space. The integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into security products will deepen as these technologies mature from experimental additions to core architectural components. The startups that succeed will be those that move beyond marketing artificial intelligence as a buzzword to delivering genuine intelligence that reduces analyst workload, improves detection accuracy, and enables predictive rather than reactive security postures.
Regulatory compliance will remain a powerful driver of security investment as India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act implementation progresses and sectoral regulations emerge for critical infrastructure, financial services, and healthcare. Startups that build compliance into their products from the ground up rather than treating it as an afterthought will gain advantages with enterprises that view regulatory risk as board-level concerns. The emphasis will shift from basic compliance checkbox exercises toward continuous compliance monitoring and reporting that demonstrates ongoing adherence rather than point-in-time certification.
The convergence of data security with identity, access management, and governance will accelerate as organizations recognize that protecting data requires understanding not just where it resides but who can access it, how they use it, and whether that usage aligns with policies and regulations. Startups that address this complete lifecycle from identity verification through access control to usage monitoring and audit will deliver greater value than those focused narrowly on any single component.
The companies profiled in this article represent the current leaders in India’s data security startup ecosystem, but the pace of innovation suggests that new entrants will continue emerging to address problems that current solutions do not adequately solve. From protecting artificial intelligence systems and large language models against novel attacks to securing quantum computing environments to addressing privacy in increasingly personal health and financial data domains, the problems requiring security innovation show no signs of diminishing.
For entrepreneurs with deep technical expertise, understanding of evolving threats, and vision to build products that address tomorrow’s challenges rather than yesterday’s, the opportunity remains as compelling in 2026 as it has ever been. India’s combination of technical talent, entrepreneurial energy, growing domestic market, and proven ability to build globally competitive products positions the country to play an increasingly central role in defining the future of data security worldwide.
