Prophaze is a WAF Kubernetes Security Startup
What is Prophaze?
Prophaze enables organizations and SaaS providers to improve their web application cybersecurity and reduce costs through AI automation, Founded by Vaisakh T R and Laxmi Das in the year 2019.
The confluence of enterprise cloud transformation and AI adaptation by cybercriminals puts defense teams at a severe disadvantage in defending from ever-increasing stealthy and unexpected attacks. There are unlimited ways by which AI attacks can compromise applications exceeding human defense capacity.
Prophaze is Kubernetes-native and their experts help organizations analyze their Kubernetes architecture for vulnerability assessment and security best practices. They help to integrate application security into the operations teams by adopting Kubernetes-native technologies to secure the cloud applications, APIs, and containers.
The vision of the startup is “to level the playing field for enterprise security teams with AI WAF automation”.
The mission is “to bridge the gap existing in terms of container-based security solutions in the market”.
| Startup | Prophaze |
| Website | prophaze.com |
| Founded | 2019 |
| Headquarters | Kochi, India |
| Products | WAF Security |
| Revenue Model | B2B, Subscriptions |
How did Prophaze start?
The founders Lakshmi and Vaisakh were working with a German client facing an issue of container-based security or Kubernetes security. When they figured that not much was available in the market, they started working on a solution themselves. Once resolved, they realized that this product could be launched as a startup as it is bridging a significant market gap.
Here is a quick overview of Prophaze
Growth
In the beginning, the firewall was the extent of cybersecurity for businesses. Thus there were a lot of cold calls. Post-pandemic, awareness of security and application firewall has been growing and hence the response to Prophaze started improving.
This deep-tech startup has 10000+ Web Attacks Blocked, 20000+ DDoS Attacks blocked, 30000+ bad Bots blocked, and 60000+ bad IPs Blocked
This Kochi based-startup has grown from 2 founders in 2019 to a team of 20 in 2023, with some advisors in the US and Australia.
Area of Operations
The team is based in Kerala but post their association with India Accelerators, their business team has been based in Gurgaon and the rest of the team works remotely across India. They have also developed a customer base in the USA and the UAE.
Special Features
WAF-as-a-Service
- Prophaze WAF service is an economical alternative to the high costs of deploying and maintaining WAF on-premise and reduces the burden from DevOps to monitor endless alerts and manual tuning.
Kubernetes Security
- Prophaze is Kubernetes native, securing Kubernetes deployments without the learning curve or complexity, and in zero downtime.
- Prophaze is configured as an ingress controller to secure all traffic from outside the cluster to services within the cluster, on private cloud, or on-premise.
Complete Security
- Prophaze WAF service protects the web assets from all cyber threats, bots, attacks, misconfiguration, and patch vulnerabilities in the infrastructure, internal or 3rd party apps, and APIs. Threat updates from thousands of international security researchers are included.
- Prophaze alerts the SIEM with identified and blocked threats to improve the total security efficacy .
AI Automation
- Prophaze AI profiles application logic and behavior, payload contents, static attributes of processes, files, and previous threats and automatically generates application-specific security policy: blacklisting, whitelisting, virtual patching, response filtering, and blocking.
- DevOps are free from configuration, maintenance, and daily security workloads, and need only fine-tune the automated security policy for specific user activities with custom rules, updating access control lists, and limiting selected IPs.
Targeted Market
All data-driven industries need security for their data and thus all such industries are a target market for Prophaze, for them to save their data from leaking into the dark web.
Prophaze Funding
Initially, the startup was bootstrapped. Angel investors from Indian Accelerators have invested in this security-based startup over two rounds of fundraising.
Competitors
Since Prophaze is architectured on Kubernetes itself, it adds to the scaling value of the solution. It is also easy to deploy, for instance, This Deep-tech does not require the commonly witnessed process of changing the DNS.
It is aimed at identifying the bad actors without blocking the real users with their behavior-based AI&ML technology. The latency of the traffic is also minimum. Support is quick and robust from the team. These factors make them stand apart from their competition in the market..
SWOT Analysis
The strength of the startup is its technology and team. They also have a 100% retention rate
The weakness of Prophaze is that it is not physically present in a lot of areas like Germany, Africa, and Australia that were interested in them.
The opportunity is wide as the WAF industry is a $25 billion market and it is still unexplored to a great extent. Even diversity in peripheral areas is lucrative in this market space.
The threat is competition and established vendors.
Awards
The duo-founded startup is the only Indian startup (or company) to be listed in the KuppingerCole Analyst Report of 2022 as an Innovation Leader
This Kochi-based startup won the IN₹ 50 Lakh first prize at the first edition of the Grand Kerela Startup Challenge at huddle Global 2022.
Prophaze Founders
Vaisakh T R is the CEO and has done his engineering at Mahatma Gandhi University
Lakshmi Das is the COO and has done her engineering at the Rajagiri School of Engineering and Technology.
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What is Prophaze?
Prophaze is a Kochi-based WAP Kubernetes security Startup