This startup will nix your firm’s information security fears – and do it cheap

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Just like you don’t want to use a car without insurance, you don’t want to run a company without information security. That is how Shanmugavel Sankaran aka Shan likes to think of his SaaS-based startup FixNix.

But that is to put things rather simply.

FixNix, founded in 2012 by Shan, helps companies automate their information security processes through its GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) solutions.

Companies like RSA Archer and MetricStream are big global names in the field. But FixNix, based in the Indian town of Vellore and headquartered in the US, promises to do the same at a fraction of their cost.

“Although there are cloud GRC companies, nobody took a bite to serve the industry with pay-per-use, subscription models,” says Shaan, who calls himself the Chief Nixer.

“Most of them used cloud as a delivery model and tried chasing the same list of Fortune companies that the big brothers of the GRC industry cater to because of the lucrative high margin, low volume game,” he tells Tech in Asia.

His company aims to democratize the GRC industry to help small enterprises in particular. FixNix has notched up 530 paid clients since November 2014.

Earlier this month, it raised a pre-series A round of US$500,000 led by Jay Vijayan, CIO of Tesla. Four other investors from Singapore and San Francisco also took part in the round.

Affordability

Photo credit: Paul L Dineen

Shanmugavel, who studied at the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), was working as the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at a startup earlier. That’s when the dearth of affordable GRC solutions hit him.

The result was FixNix.

“We compete with RSA Archer, MetricStream, Thomson Reuters Accelus, Nasdaq BWise, and IBM Open Pages. All the above provide solutions at the rate of US$100,000,” says Shan.

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