This small town Indian boy secures funding to make apps less vulnerable

The Appvigil team

Indian app security startup Appvigil today announced that it has secured US$500,000 from existing investors in a pre series A round. The investors include NASSCOM Product Council chairman Ravi Gururaj, Yahoo director Gaurav Sharma, former GupShup CTO Viswanath Ramachandran, the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), investment bank RippleWave, and a large unnamed global IT security company. Last year, Appvigil raised US$160,000 in seed funding.

Appvigil scans apps to detect vulnerability and loopholes and provides recommendations to fix them. It can resolve security issues even during the development phase. The startup has also developed a consumer version of its app to help users check the hackability of apps on their phones and report to the developer in case any loopholes exist. While antivirus apps look for malware on the phone, Appvigil detects which apps can be targeted by hackers to inject such malware. It also rates each app in the phone with a “Vigil Score” based on how secure it is, so that users can report the vulnerability to its developer asking him to fix the issues.

“Water tight security of mobile devices is no longer a luxury, it is an absolute necessity,” says Gururaj. “News of security breaches are regular events which I expect will increase in frequency and severity. Every major brand has a customer-facing mobile experience which they now need to ensure is secure for all their stakeholders. Appvigil addresses this critical growing market need with very innovative and robust products,” he adds.

See: Enough of hacks: this Indian startup makes apps like Ola, Zomato, Slack less vulnerable

Appvigil was founded in 2011 by computer science grad Toshendra Sharma while he was pursuing his masters degree at Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. Hailing from the small but stunningly beautiful town of Dehradun, Sharma, the son of fruit seller funded his product by offering cyber security training to organisations.

“App coders tend to be feature-oriented, and inexperienced at secure coding practices making their apps susceptible to hacking,” says Sharma adding that Appvigil helps app developers focus on building awesome features while the security loopholes are taken care of.

The startup claims to run millions of scans in parallel across the most dangerous vulnerabilities. It does not need the app’s source code for integration, which makes scanning more secure for companies who don’t want to share their code outside their infrastructure.

Appvigil offers one free scan, after which the solution is available for a monthly subscription of US$299-999 to Android app developers. It claims to have 700 clients in India, Hong Kong, and the US. The funds will be used to get more customers and also launch its product on the iOS and Windows operating systems. The startup intends to set up offices across major cities in India.

Appvigil competes with JFDI Asia and Microsoft Ventures-backed Appknox, which also scans apps for security flaws, before and after they are released.