Learn to Sell, Learn to Build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable. – Naval Ravikant

As an investor, it is my job (and luck) to find unstoppable founders. And this is something I felt deeply when I met Shikhil & Ananda, the co-founders of Astra Security. As my friend Vijay Rayapati says, Indian founders are great at building products but not so much at marketing and selling. But Shikhil and Ananda are a founder-duo who excel at both.

A testament to this fact is that, at such an early stage of their journey, they have over 650 customers, of which ~75% are inbound. This includes names like Loom, MamaEarth, Rategain, Muthoot Finance, NIIT, and many others.

Shikhil and Ananda have been hackers and builders for over a decade. They were running a comfortable business but soon realised that this business didn’t meet the scale of their ambitions and decided to go after a 20+ billion dollar opportunity that is growing at a rate of 10% YOY.

In their conversations with CTOs & CISOs they learned that the speed at which engineering has paced over the years, security hasn’t kept up really well with it. And it’s because security was never integrated well with the workflow of engineering teams. Cyber security practices like penetration testing were being done in a very sporadic way, once a year, once two years. But new code was being pushed into production almost every day.

During our first conversation Shikhil told me, “Every day, 50 plus new vulnerabilities are uncovered in the world. Leave alone developers, it’s practically impossible for a security engineer to be updated with all of them.”

Today Astra’s vulnerability scanning engine scans for 9300+ test cases. And they are actively adding every month to that list. If an organisation fails to detect these vulnerabilities then one of these could be fatal to the organisation. That’s why modern day CTOs and CISOs want test for security vulnerabilities continuously.

And Astra solves this perfectly by its integration with CI/CD pipelines, thus ensuring vulnerabilities get detected before they go live in production.

Today, Astra stands as a leader in the continuous pentesting space, with an impressive track record of uncovering 2 million+ vulnerabilities last year and saving over $69+ million in potential losses for its customers.

But not all vulnerabilities are equal. Prioritising a high severity vulnerability is not enough. Sometimes a low severity vulnerability combined with another medium severity vulnerability can be fatal. As a hacker would never find one vulnerability and exploit. They combine multiple vulnerabilities to make an actual attack. And this is what Shikhil and Ananda are solving next as prioritisation is a big challenge for CISOs.

This deep understanding of how real-world attacks work sets Astra apart. We believe their approach of making security an integral part of the development process will become the new standard for how modern organizations protect themselves

Neon is proud to be part of Astra’s journey in building the bold future of cybersecurity. A future where cybersecurity is intuitive, integrated, and indispensable for businesses worldwide.