9 Jun 2025
Opinion
2 Min Read
How a College Dropout Built a $120M Cybersecurity Company
This person did not want to wait for cyberattacks to happen. Most companies react to cyberattacks after the damage is done.
But one Indian college dropout thought: What if we could catch the threat before it begins?
That guy was Rahul Sasi.
Rahul was deep into the world of cybersecurity during college, and while usually college kids try to study the syllabus, Rahul spent all his college years learning more about the cyber world.
Eventually, he dropped out of college and became a full-blown cybersecurity researcher in an international company.
He noticed something nobody else was really paying attention to.
See, back then, most security tools were built to monitor what happened inside the company — these were antivirus, firewalls, IDS systems.
But Rahul was like, “What about the threats from the outside world?” No one was watching the surface web, deep web, dark web, rogue servers, or exposed APIs.
So in 2015, he founded a Saas company, CloudSEK.
His idea was simple: ‘Security should be predictive, not forensic. ’
CloudSEK was an AI-based threat platform that detected and stopped cyber attacks before they happened.
They got seed-funded by ME Meeran Foundation, the investment arm of Eastern Group and launched their first product, XVigil, in 2016.
The same Eastern group, along with BlueJeans, became CloudSEK’s first customers.
By 2017, they had landed more international companies as customers like GoJeK of Indonesia and Grab of Singapore. Suddenly, the world started noticing, and investors started coming in.
Between 2018 and 2019, CloudSEK raised over $2.49 million in early-stage funding from Exfinity Venture Partners and StartupXseed.
They expanded all across India, Southeast Asia, and the Americas.
In 2019, they won the Industry awards from NASSCOM, NVIDIA, and NetApp.
The recognition started pouring in like anything.
Today, CloudSEK protects 250+ companies like ICICI Bank, NPCI, Ola, MetLife, CommVault, and Decathlon.
They’ve raised over $32 million from Tenacity, MassMutual Ventures, Neon, and Inflexor Ventures.
Their latest round last week brought in $19 million, pushing their valuation to $120 million.
As for Rahul Sasi — a college dropout?
He is now a respected global voice in cybersecurity. He sits on panels with the Reserve Bank of India and MeitY.
Siddhartha Ahluwalia
Siddhartha Ahluwalia is the Managing Partner at Neon Fund and host of The Neon Show, one of the top business podcasts focused on the India-US startup ecosystem. He previously founded Addodoc (a B2B SaaS CRM for pediatricians) and Babygogo (a healthtech startup acquired by Sheroes). He later worked at Prime Ventures and led the SaaS Ecosystem at AWS India before starting Neon Fund. With deep expertise in 0-1 startup building, he helps founders scale B2B SaaS companies in the US from $0 to $10M ARR.
