Cisco Chairman John Chambers Invests in Delhi-based Cybersecurity Startup Lucideus

Delhi-based and IIT Bombay incubated cybersecurity startup Lucideus has raised US$5 million (~ Rs 36 crore) in Series A round of funding, led by Cisco Chairman Emeritus John Chambers. John has infused funding in Lucideus through his recently launched JC2 Ventures, reported Fortune India.

Out of $5 million, John Chambers has pumped in $4 million, while a handful of angel investors infused the rest of the money.

The latest funding is a result of interesting interaction between John Chambers and CEO of Lucideus, Saket Modi, wherein Chambers asked Modi to explain his business in 15 seconds, and Modi did, and Chambers was stumped.

While the ticket size isn't huge, the investment is crucial as it highlights the potential that investors like Chambers see in cybersecurity in India, and the opportunity that may exist for enterprise service and product providers like Lucideus globally.

[caption id="attachment_127020" align="aligncenter" width="699"] John Chambers and Saket Modi [Image - Tom Upton Studio
/ Fortuneindia.com][/caption]

The startup will be use the freshly raised capital to expand its presence in the US as well as existing markets like India, and also to further strengthen its platform to provide more robust security to the startup's enterprise customers that span across banking and financial services, retail and others.

According to Saket Modi, CEO of Lucideus, the company has seen its revenues growing in triple digits year-on-year and has been cash flow positive for the last few years.

Earlier in May 2017, the startup had raised funding from a clutch of global executives like Google's Rajan Anandan, Facebook Messenger executive Anand Chandrasekaran and FreeCharge's ex-CEO Govind Rajan.

This is Cisco Chairman's second investment in India after he had invested in Chennai-based Uniphore Software Systems, a speech recognition solutions company. In May last year, Chamber had announced the launch of US$70 million fund dedicated exclusively for Indian startups.

Founded in 2012 by by Saket Modi, Vidit Baxi and Rahul Tyagi, Lucideus is a pure play Cybersecurity company, providing Cyber Security platforms to enterprise and governments across the globe. It is empanelled in CERT India, India'a nodal agency to deal with cybersecurity, as one of the certified cyber security auditors by Government of India.

Notably, Lucideus is also the cybersecurity firm behind the end-to-end cybersecurity assessment of the BHIM payments application as well as UPI (Unified Payments Interface) library that is today embedded into the mobile banking applications of almost all banks in the country that have a mobile banking facility for transfer of money.

Besides Lucideus, other cybersuecurity startup from India which has raised funding most recently is Mumbai headquartered Sequretek, which had raised US$3.7 million in a bridge round led by Unicorn India Ventures and other investors including GVFL and Sharad Sanghi, MD & CEO, Netmagic.

According to Nasscom, the Indian IT industry is set to reach a size of $350-400 billion by 2025. The country can build a cybersecurity products and services industry of $35 billion by 2025 and generate a skilled workforce of one million in the security sector.

Globally, the cybersecurity market is expected to grow from $152.71 billion in 2018 to $248.26 billion by 2023, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.2% during 2018-23, according to a new market research report by MarketsandMarkets. The major forces driving the growth in the space are strict data protection directives and rising cyberterrorism. The cybersecurity market is growing rapidly because of the rising need for cloud-based cybersecurity solutions among enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) alike.

Cyber Security Firm Lucideus Raises Funding from Rajan Anandan, Govind Rajan & Others

Lucideus, an IT risk assessments and digital security platforms provider, has announced that they have closed an angel funding round of undisclosed amount.

The list of angel investors who participated in the round include - Amit Ranjan (Chief Architect, Digilocker), Anurag Goel (CEO, Cactus Communication), Govind Rajan (ex CEO, Freecharge), Jonathan Boutelle (ex Director of Technology, LinkedIn/SlideShare), Rajan Anandan (Managing Director, Google), Rahul Chawla (Managing Director, Head of Global Markets, Deutsche Bank), Salil Donde (ex EVP, NASDAQ), Sunil Kalra (Angel Investor), Vellayan Subbiah (Managing Director, Cholamandalam Finance), Kulmeet Bawa, MD, Adobe and Victor J Menezes (Angel Investor).

In its last angel funding round, the company had raised funding from three investors including Anand Chandrasekaran (Director, Messenger, Facebook), Amit Chowdhary (Director, Motilal Oswal PE) and Sanjay Baweja (CFO, Suzlon Energy).

Saket Modi, CEO & Co-founder, Lucideus said, “As a company we have been growing 700% y-o-y (average) while being cash flow positive for the last 4 years. We have got a set of marquee names of handpicked investors who have not only invested their money but also bring in their strategic and technical guidance.”

Talking about his investment Govind Rajan one of the angel investors said, "Lucideus has shown a consistent top line growth while continuing to innovate itself in the cyber security industry. At a time when both the government and the private sector are adapting digital, their cyber risk is increasing exponentially with linear addition to their technology stack. Considering all the ground work done by Lucideus for the last 5 years, I feel they are well positioned to grab the market opportunity and emerge as clear market leaders."

Saket Modi, further highlights, “With an access to the office of the CTO, CIO and CISO of over a 100 customers across the globe, a year back we realized a pressing need that was not being answered by any of the existing products in the cybersecurity space. To address the same we will be launching a cyber risk management platform very soon. The funding raised is largely being used for the research & development of this platform.”

Incubated from IIT Bombay, Lucideus is an IT Risk Assessment and Digital Security Platforms provider. It’s a trusted standard for companies that need to protect their brands, businesses and dignity from debilitating cyber attacks. It builds and delivers information security platforms and services, both generic and customized to proactively secure, continuously monitor and reactively respond to cyber threats to an organisation’s technology stack. Its objective is quantify digital risk to inculcate a knowledge-based culture of safe and secure use of technology, such that cyber risk becomes an informed business decision leading to minimal disruptions to businesses.