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Startup Deep Dive : CloudSEK — the founder the US denied a visa now has its state fund as a backer

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for CloudSEK.

In 2012, a 23-year-old college dropout from Alappuzha, Kerala, was denied a US visa to speak at the Black Hat security conference despite holding an official invitation. Fourteen years later, that same founder’s cybersecurity company, CloudSEK, has raised roughly $38 million from investors that now include the State of Connecticut’s own venture fund.

The contradiction sits at the centre of the CloudSEK story: a firm built by someone the American immigration system once rejected outright is today headquartered in Singapore, books more than 60% of its new revenue from outside India, and is chasing US enterprise customers with a five-person Boston-area team. Its Indian operating entity, meanwhile, still lost money in the year ending March 2025 even as the wider business says it crossed $15 million in annual recurring revenue.

Quick facts

Company CloudSEK Information Security Pte Ltd (Singapore parent); CloudSEK Information Security Private Limited (Indian operating subsidiary, incorporated in Kerala)
Founded 2015, Kerala (bootstrapped)
Founder(s) Rahul Sasi (co-founder and CEO); Mohanlal Parameshwara Menon and Syed Shahrukh Ahmad (co-founders)
Businesses AI-driven digital risk and threat intelligence platform: XVigil, BeVigil, SVigil and the Nexus AI command centre
Latest FY revenue ₹74.1 crore (~$7.7 million) for FY25 (Indian subsidiary; year ended March 2025)
Latest FY profit/loss Net loss of ₹6.4 crore for FY25, per one financial tracker; a second tracker shows a small positive margin for the same filing period (see “The numbers”)
Listed Private; no IPO announced
Market value / last valuation Reported at $118–120 million post-money as of its May 2025 round (unconfirmed by the company)
Key shareholders / CEO Rahul Sasi (CEO); backers include MassMutual Ventures, Exfinity Venture Partners, Omidyar Network India, Commvault and Connecticut Innovations

What they do

CloudSEK sells what it calls predictive threat intelligence: software that watches the surface web, deep web, dark web and a company’s own internet-facing infrastructure for the early signs of a breach — leaked credentials, exposed APIs, misconfigured cloud buckets, compromised vendors — and flags them before an attacker uses them. The pitch is timing: rather than telling a security team what already went wrong, the platform tries to surface the “initial attack vector” while there is still a window to close it. Its customers sit mostly in banking, financial services, healthcare, technology, telecom, aviation and government, and as of its most recent funding announcement the company counted more than 250 enterprise clients across these sectors.

The origin

Rahul Sasi grew up in Mavelikkara in Kerala’s Alappuzha district, the son of a state transport corporation bus conductor. He did not own a laptop until 2008. During his engineering degree at CSI College of Engineering in Ooty, he found that routine coursework did little for him but that cybersecurity problems held his attention for hours. In his seventh semester, in 2010, he was offered an internship at the US threat-intelligence firm iSIGHT Partners (later acquired by Google Cloud). His college would not grant him leave to take it, so he dropped out rather than turn it down. He went on to join Citrix in India, reportedly the first person without an engineering degree the company had hired there.

By 2015 Sasi had identified a gap he thought was worth building a company around: enterprises had plenty of tools to watch their own networks — antivirus, intrusion detection, intrusion prevention — but almost nothing that systematically watched the outside world for threats aimed at them. He quit Citrix, founded CloudSEK in 2015 with co-founders Mohanlal Parameshwara Menon and Syed Shahrukh Ahmad, and bootstrapped the company’s first stretch with seed backing from the Meeran family, promoters of the Eastern Group of Companies.

The struggle years

The setback that shaped Sasi’s outlook predates the company itself. In 2012, with an official invitation to speak at the Black Hat Briefings in the United States, he applied for a US visa and was turned down. He has said immigration officers questioned his salary, his lack of an engineering degree, and his general eligibility to travel for the work he was doing. He made himself a private promise afterwards: he would not set foot in the US again until he had built something that created jobs there.

The early CloudSEK years brought a second, quieter struggle: a company built in Kerala, selling a category — external threat intelligence — that most Indian enterprises in 2015 and 2016 did not yet have a budget line for. CloudSEK’s own account of its history says real customer traction only began within months of its platform’s 2017 launch, roughly two years after founding, and that its early institutional capital came in small, staggered pieces — a pre-Series A of under $2 million in November 2018, and a further sub-$500,000 top-up in February 2019 — the kind of slow, thin funding drip that reflects a company still proving a hard-to-sell category rather than one riding obvious demand.

The clearest resolution to that struggle was geographic, not financial: CloudSEK relocated its headquarters from India to Singapore after landing its first major customer there, betting that a Southeast Asian and eventually global enterprise base would validate the category faster than the home market alone.

The turning point

The clearest inflection arrived in May 2025. CloudSEK closed $19 million in combined Series A2 and Series B1 funding — its largest single raise, more than 2.5 times the $7 million Series A it had closed in December 2021 under MassMutual Ventures. The round brought in a new strategic backer, the data-security firm Commvault, alongside MassMutual Ventures, Inflexor Ventures, Prana Ventures and Tenacity Ventures, and it was reported to value the company at roughly $118–120 million post-money, against no publicly confirmed valuation at the Series A stage. Alongside the raise, CloudSEK said it had become cash-flow positive and that annual recurring revenue had tripled over the preceding 24 months, with more than 60% of new revenue now coming from outside India. Eight months later, in January 2026, that momentum pulled in a US state’s own venture arm: Connecticut Innovations put in $10 million, which CloudSEK says made it the first Indian-origin cybersecurity company to be backed by a US state-backed fund — a fittingly symmetrical bookend to the visa refusal thirteen years earlier.

The money behind it

CloudSEK has raised money in small, spaced-out rounds rather than one or two mega-raises, a shape typical of enterprise security startups that need years to prove a category before institutional capital moves at scale.

Total disclosed funding is reported at roughly $38.5 million by both Inc42 and the funding database Clay, though CB Insights puts the cumulative figure lower, at about $33.5 million — the gap likely reflects differing treatment of the undisclosed 2015 seed round and smaller grant funding, such as a 2019 NetApp Excellerator grant reported at $15,000. What backers changed is visible in the sequence: Exfinity and StartupXseed supplied the first institutional validation in 2018; MassMutual’s 2021 Series A gave CloudSEK its first large single cheque and a lead investor that returned for the 2025 round; and Commvault’s 2025 entry as a strategic investor, alongside Connecticut Innovations in 2026, shifted the cap table from purely financial Indian and Asian VCs toward US-linked strategic and public-sector capital — a signal that tracks the company’s own stated push into the American market. In April 2026, Exfinity Venture Partners partially exited via a secondary sale to existing investors, reportedly realising a 13x multiple on invested capital and an internal rate of return above 40% while retaining a stake (Entrackr) — a strong signal of paper returns for CloudSEK’s earliest backer, though it says nothing about the company’s own profitability.

How it makes money

CloudSEK runs a business-to-business software subscription model sold to enterprise security teams, layered across a handful of named products rather than one monolithic platform.

Money comes in as annual or multi-year enterprise contracts, priced per organisation rather than per seat, which is standard for threat-intelligence tooling sold to security operations centres. Money goes out mostly on the two things a threat-intelligence vendor cannot cut without hurting the product: the researcher and data-science headcount needed to keep crawling and interpreting the open, deep and dark web, and the compute cost of running AI models across that data at scale. The part outsiders tend to get wrong is assuming a monitoring tool is a one-time software cost with software-like margins from day one — in practice the ongoing human research and data-acquisition cost behind the automation is closer to a managed-intelligence-service cost structure, which is one reason the Indian entity’s revenue growth has so far outpaced its path to a filed profit, even as the wider group says it has turned cash-flow positive.

The numbers

Two full fiscal years of financials for the Indian entity, CloudSEK Information Security Private Limited, are visible via secondary trackers of its regulatory filings. Figures for CloudSEK’s Singapore parent, which appears to book a majority of international revenue, are not publicly filed and are not included here.

Fiscal year Revenue (₹ crore) Profit / (loss) (₹ crore)
FY24 (year ended March 2024) 73.3 Not disclosed in available trackers
FY25 (year ended March 2025) 74.1 (6.4), a −8.6% net margin, per Inc42’s tracker

Revenue and profit/loss figures for FY22 and FY23 are not reliably available in the trackers checked for this piece and have been cut rather than estimated.

Where the money comes from

The risks

The takeaway

The lesson CloudSEK’s path offers is not really about cybersecurity at all. It is about what a founder does with a closed door. Sasi did not treat the 2012 visa refusal as a verdict on his ability; he treated it as a target to eventually beat, and he built the company slowly enough — small pre-seed cheques, a multi-year wait for product-market fit, a headquarters move only once a real customer justified it — that the target stayed reachable. The harder discipline, visible in CloudSEK’s own numbers, is resisting the temptation to let a good self-reported growth story (tripling ARR, cash-flow positive, 300-plus customers) paper over a less flattering filed one (a lossmaking Indian entity, near-flat local revenue). Founders who survive long funding gaps tend to be the ones willing to let both versions of the story stand side by side.

Frequently asked questions

What does CloudSEK do?

CloudSEK builds an AI-driven digital risk and threat intelligence platform — products including XVigil, BeVigil, SVigil and Nexus AI — that monitors the surface, deep and dark web plus a customer’s own exposed infrastructure to flag signs of an impending breach, such as leaked credentials or exposed APIs, before attackers can use them.

Who founded CloudSEK and when?

CloudSEK was founded in 2015 by Rahul Sasi, Mohanlal Parameshwara Menon and Syed Shahrukh Ahmad, bootstrapped initially with seed backing from the Meeran family of the Eastern Group of Companies. Rahul Sasi serves as co-founder and CEO.

How much funding has CloudSEK raised, and what is it worth?

CloudSEK has raised roughly $38.5 million across seed to Series B2 rounds according to Inc42 and Clay, though CB Insights puts the cumulative figure closer to $33.5 million. Its most recent disclosed valuation, following a $19 million round in May 2025, was reported at $118–120 million post-money by CB Insights and Clay; the company has not confirmed this figure itself.

Is CloudSEK profitable?

Its Indian operating subsidiary reported a net loss of ₹6.4 crore in the year ended March 2025 on revenue of ₹74.1 crore, per Inc42’s tracker (a separate tracker, Tofler, shows a small positive margin for the same period, and the two have not been reconciled). Separately, CloudSEK has said the wider group became cash-flow positive around its May 2025 funding round.

Where is CloudSEK headquartered, and why did it move from India?

CloudSEK is now headquartered in Singapore. It relocated there from Kerala after signing its first major enterprise customer in Singapore, a shift that also lines up with the company’s growing reliance on international revenue, which now makes up more than 60% of its new business.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

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