1) Tell us about your background and how you started the company.
I grew up in India and growing up my mother inspired me to dream big and dream often. Now with experience I know, if I dream big, dream often, and never give up, dreams do come true.
When I worked at Bell Labs, I was fortunate to work with Ken Thompson, the “Father of UNIX” and that experience inspires me to build, grow, and innovate to this day.
By the time I finished my undergraduate, I had already dabbled in entrepreneurship by starting a couple of companies. While I failed with those ventures, I learned a lot. My love for continuous learning led me to do a Masters in Computer Science and an Executive MBA from Columbia Business School and London Business School.
I left ForeScout, when it was just two months away from going IPO as my heart was already on fire with a dream to start my own company, Avid Secure, to solve the rapidly growing cloud security problem. We built an AI-powered multi-cloud security and compliance platform.It gained great momentum, and the company was acquired by Sophos.
In July 2020, due to COVID, I noticed that all work was going remote and this accelerated digital transformation.I knew attackers would take advantage of our increased reliance on software to launch more attacks. I decided to start ArmorCode to help companies fight this by shipping secure code.
2) What are the key problems you are addressing and how you are delivering value to customers?
Agile DevOps, cloud, microservices, and open source have all dramatically accelerated application delivery and complexity. Today’s security teams depend on a collection of scanners that each represent an overlapping piece of the puzzle and lead to siloed manual processes within security teams and across the organization. This leaves them struggling to gain visibility, insight, and process scale they need to identify and protect their ever-growing risk surface.
The AI-powered ArmorCode Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) Platform is the solution to this challenge.
ArmorCode’s customers range from marquee Fortune 500 companies to midsize companies. We have customers with 100 developers to 10,000+ developers. ArmorCode has been spotlighted by Nasdaq several times and has won coveted awards like SINET 16, TiE 50, and Fortune 60.
I knew a movement was needed to change this narrative. So, when I started ArmorCode, I reached out to several security leaders and co-founded the Purple Book Community, a global community of leading security leaders. We co-authored an award winning book on Application and Product Security called “The Purple Book of Software Security” to educate the broader community of shipping secure software and best practices in doing that.
We came together to raise the awareness among the business leaders across the world, be it Nasdaq or Davos alongside the World Economic Forum.
3) How did you get engaged with Tau Ventures? What are your core beliefs and how have they powered your entrepreneurship journey?
Tau Ventures was one of the first investors in ArmorCode and have been our steadfast supporters.We are very thankful for that and look forward to scaling the company in partnership with Tau.
Startup journey is hard, so I knew unless we had a shared set of values that bind us together, it would be hard for us to power our journey through obstacles.
So, we have enshrined in our company’s culture, what we call 5H values: Humanity, Hungry, Hardworking, Humility, and Honesty. These bind us together and drive our hyper growth.
In spite of all the financial success we are having, I am most proud of the high performance team we have built that puts our customer success at the core of everything we do. Our customers have reciprocated, by making us a highly rated ASPM platform on Gartner Peer Insights.
Recently Forbes called us one of coolest startups to work for in America. ArmorCode is ranked #203 on a list of coolest startups which also has other stalwarts like OpenAI at #55 and Discord at #383.
Nearly 5.5 million businesses were launched in the United States in 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics. To make it to #203 in less than four years of the company’s launch speaks volumes of the team culture we have built and the mission that inspires all ArmorCoders!
At ArmorCode Inc. we have done it right, from day 1.
And it still feels like day 1 at ArmorCode as we still have a long way to go!
