Startup Circle: How is WiJungle managing and safeguarding entire network?

WiJungle, a ‘Make in India’ cyber security firm, has progressively established its eminence worldwide. The company develops and markets ‘Unified Network Security Gateway’ and currently serves government and private giants across industry verticals like hospitality, healthcare, education, BFSI, retail, defense, transportation, smart city, ITES, etc. in 25+ countries worldwide.

WiJungle is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning based unified network security gateway product. It enables organizations to manage and safeguard their entire network by means of a single window.

How did you come up with the idea?

Somewhere the idea has been a derivative from the understanding build during our last ventures. Let me walk you through in detail and bring a clear sense to the conversation.

We began our entrepreneurial journey back in 2014 as a Completely Free Public WiFi service with no data and time limit. While implementing the same, the consulted system integrators suggested us to deploy two different products at the gateway level, one - UTM (from security angle) and other – AAA/Hotspot Gateway product (from visitor authentication side).

For us as founders, somewhere digesting this suggestion was difficult due to the below reasons:

1. UTM i.e. Unified Threat Management by default offers 70% of the AAA product functionalities and the remaining 30% differentiation is just around the user authentication modes. Technically, we were not able to figure out the reason behind the existence of a separate redundant product just for authentication modes.

With time we got the understanding that the current network security market is scattered and there exists a specific vendor to serve a specific problem or the same vendor has multiple products to address those problems.

2. Unnecessary Rise in investment (almost double) because of redundant hardware appliances.

3. Complexity to understand and manage different product dashboards/support on a day-day basis.

Two years later when we were taking steps to initiate something around security, the above facts gave realization to work around All-In-One product and we termed it as Unified Network Security Gateway.

The focus was to make security more accessible by bringing down the cost and simplifying management.

Also making it more comprehensive by aggregating data of different endpoints running in different locations which earlier was distributed between multiple vendors.

How does your platform work?

It is an appliance-based solution that is deployed at the gateway level of an organization and is made available to them on Annual, Triennial and Quinquennial license basis. All the traffic coming in or going out is being monitored, scanned and analyzed by WiJungle. Being an all-in-product, it caters to the capabilities of a NextGen Firewall, WAF, Hotspot Gateway, Vulnerability Assessment, SD-WAN, End Point DLP, etc. and can be easily managed by the IT administrator through a single window.

What were the challenges and How did you overcome them?

The first major challenge in front of us was to deliver trust to the customers by offering comprehensive capabilities that are either parallel or advanced comparative to the existing best of breed silos.

We fulfilled it by providing in-depth industry-wise specialized features and applying infinite optimizations to match required IO & performance demands.

The second challenge was to gain acceptance and sales preference from the channel partner community and we achieved it by doing three things:

a) Reduced their pre-sales bandwidth through automated partner portal & offering tech demo facility directly by WiJungle to their customers.

b) Round the clock dedicated agent support with committed 90 mins resolution time over Whatsapp, Web Chat, Email, and Phone.

c) Acknowledging efforts with higher margin.

How did you build the core team (co-founders and initial employees)?

So, it was back in January 2014 when I was looking forward to start something of my own and needed somebody to join as co-founder. Almost the same time Praveen, who is also my elder cousin, was looking to move out and start something on the technology side. Consequently, Praveen registered a proprietary firm in April with the name HttpCart and he requested me to help him out with logo design.

And that’s where synergies build because he was very much aware of my appetite for business and his inclination towards tech. The complementary skills made us start together.

We hired the initial employees in technology for free WiFi project and somewhere at that point we just had the vision to sell. They bought it and onboarded us by leaving large setup companies.

What has been your business growth till now?

The adaptability of the product has been so, that we have grown from a single city to 25+ countries within 21 months of time. We have grown 500% year on year.

What is the one thing that sets you apart from your competitors?

The key parameter is, we are the only player that offers unified network security gateway product and hence don’t have any direct competitor.

Funding

Currently, WiJungle is bootstrapped and will look to raise soon for future roadmaps.

Future plans

We are expanding and strengthening our on-ground sales team across India and planning to initiate operations in the Middle East and South Asia.

On the technology front, we are adding up more feature capabilities to our Unified Network Security Gateway. In parallel, we are also working on our SASE platform and look forward to launch the beta by late 2020.

Karmesh Gupta, Co-Founder & CEO

He started his professional journey in early 2013 with Rajasthan Royals as a CSR Executive. Further due to interest in cyber security, he worked as an intern and on part-time basis with Lucideus (a cyber security firm run by his alumni, Saket Modi). He also worked as an intern with Namekart (a domain brokerage startup) and decent solutions (an ed-tech startup). In Oct 2014, he co-founded HttpCart Technologies with Praveen Gupta (Elder Cousin) with the vision to make it a global technology-product company.