Companies today adopt various strategies to protect their sensitive data – data such as secrets, e.g., API tokens, SSH keys, or passwords; PII data, including customer phone numbers or emails; and business-sensitive data such as company financials or intellectual property. The solutions adopted often involve multiple DIY tools. Moreover, these solutions are cobbled together by generalist developers instead of security specialists. At fast-growing mid to late-stage companies, the burden on developers to move fast is high, and security often becomes an afterthought.
To address this security concern, CommandK announced a $3 million seed round led by Lightspeed to help companies – and developers within these companies – achieve higher security standards with little to no change management at their end. The round also saw participation from a range of angel investors.
CommandK manages the end-to-end lifecycle of sensitive data. Starting with secure storage, secure sharing with programs, third-party services, or authorized users, and simplifying compliance controls by replacing multiple-point solutions with a single platform.
This approach ensures there is zero developer dependency in managing sensitive data, allowing security teams to get the highest order of security while letting developers focus on building features. CommandK is deployed as a managed solution within the company’s virtual private cloud, ensuring that sensitive data never leaves the company’s network.
CommandK co-founder and CEO Jayesh Sidhwani explained, “Large web-scale companies have resources to build internal tools that allow developers to build secure products; however, these tools need constant upgrades in the ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape. Unless the companies have a dedicated team to focus on this problem, the company’s overall security posture keeps falling behind.
“Companies cannot put data security on the back burner any longer,” Sidhwani continued. “In 2022 alone, companies spent an average of $5 million in a single instance of a data breach. About half of the breaches involved leaked secrets or sensitive data. At the same time, because security is a niche skill, hiring security engineers isn’t easy or scalable. We built CommandK to fill this gap.”
Sidhwani and co-founder Rohan Prabhu, who is the CTO, have worked in infrastructure and engineering roles at companies such as Disney+ Hotstar, Jupiter, Amazon and Google. At Hotstar – a live and on-demand OTT service in India – Sidhwani helped build the core platform that holds the world record for the most concurrent live connections on an internet product (25 million). Prabhu built some of the most sophisticated backend infrastructure for Jupiter, one of India’s fastest-growing neo-banks. CommandK has been built on top of the years of experience the founders have had to solve this issue in their prior roles.
CommandK is in a private beta phase and is working with companies to solve their security challenges.
