Leading the Cyber Game by Securing the Armed Forces & Enterprises Innefu, an AI-driven cyber security R&D startup is developing big data solutions for streamlining data ingestion, extraction, analytics and visualization via predictive intelligence and facial recognition

As the world is battling with not just physical but virtual security threats, the expedition to find viable cybersecurity solutions has become intense. India's cybersecurity market is still at a nascent stage with a limited number of players is currently developing solutions for data protection for enterprises. Nearly 175 pure-play data protection companies are currently operating in India.

Unlike other industries that are majorly focused on the B2C segment; Indian cybersecurity companies are extensively focused on the B2B segment. Recently, national security has been high on alert due to concerns around state-sponsored attacks. Several security companies including QuNu Labs, Orkash, eMudhra and Innefu are working with government agencies in and outside India.

One of these disruptive organizations - Innefu Labs is an information security R&D startup providing cutting edge information security & data analytics solutions. Founded in September 2012 by two IT engineers, Tarun Wig and Abhishek Sharma, the AI-driven company is developing products in the field of analytics and cybersecurity.

Enterprising Tech

Innefu predominantly works with large enterprises and defence agencies as well as law enforcement agencies across the country. The startup has worked with the largest paramilitary forces in the world, including the Indian army. The startup has developed a state-of-art predictive intelligence platform called Prophecy that has 5 modules for predictive intelligence, streamlining data ingestion, extraction, analytics and visualization.

"Prophecy is a big data radical platform which takes data from a multitude of sources. It could be unstructured data, such as text documents, videos or images and it could also be structured databases spread across organizations. We correlate all those data sources into our big data repository and AI models before predicting events which are likely to happen," said Wig.

The AI model can be used to predict fraud in the insurance sector, law enforcement, banking and finance etc. The framework is specifically tailored for law enforcement agencies as well as defence forces and large enterprises. Innefu envisions next-gen video analytics and facial recognition solution showing the accuracy of 98.3 per cent by leveraging deep learning-based neural networks.

AI for Social Welfare

When the entire world was moving into the corporate sector or developing technology for the corporate sector, Innefu decided to focus on developing solutions for defence and army. Sharing the reason through an anecdote, Wig stated, "Delhi Police used one module of our solution to identify 3000 missing children in four days. This was the first actual use case of AI for social welfare."

Innefu is predicting integration hotspots, places where security integration can take place, when can it be placed, what are the parameters which are affecting that, for one of the largest paramilitary forces in the world. "This is making a valuable change to millions of people. Every crime that we are able to prevent ends up saving a life, saving property. This is not just exciting; this is need of the hour," Wig stated.

The field of security and surveillance requires cutting-edge technology, intermixed with a lot of domain expertise. Innefu has an eight-year domain expertise in the space. The startup, however, intends to move from the business to business (B2B) segment to business to consumer (B2C) in order to provide security at a consumer-level soon.

India's Cybersecurity Landscape

In 2018, Innefu won the 'Security Product Company of the Year' by Data Security Council of India (DSCI), a not-for-profit, industry body on data protection in India, set up by NASSCOM. The preceding year, the startup was classified as one of the top five companies in the cyber excellence globally. The same year, Innefu raised $2 million in series A round of funding from VC fund IndiaNivesh.

According to DSCI's "Indian Cybersecurity Product Landscape' report, the cybersecurity product market in the country is valued at $450-500 million in FY2018 has grown at CAGR of 25-30 per cent since FY2016. The landscape has witnessed 60 per cent Y-o-Y growth for new-age startups, 70 per cent of which are bootstrapped. Trends are however changing.

VCs have started betting big on pure-play security players, large enterprises and the government are getting extra cautious about securing their cloud. This awareness has boosted the inception of companies focused on developing network security and security analytics' products. Notably, nearly $250-300 of funds has been pumped into the system in the last 5 years.