By Jason Malki • Nov 6, 2024

Published in SuperWarm

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Introduction

I had the pleasure of interviewing Ravi Srivatsav, Co-founder and CEO of DataKrypto. Ravi is a serial entrepreneur with extensive experience in the tech industry. Most recently, he was a partner at Bain & Company, advising Fortune 500 companies. Before that, he served as the Chief Product and Commercial Officer at NTT Research. He was also the Founder of ElasticBox and led it to a successful acquisition by CenturyLink.

What motivated you to launch your startup?

The idea to launch DataKrypto came from working with a data retention system (DRS) provider that offers its services to telecommunications (telco) providers and law enforcement agencies (LEAs). One of its telco clients reported an issue where data requests showed no additional data beyond a certain point. When this happens, it typically indicates an insider attack. To address the insider threat and secure the telco customer’s data, our DRS client turned to us. Our team had been developing Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to enable continuous encryption and end-to-end data protection. We implemented our technology across the DRS provider’s entire system, ensuring that all data, including audit logs, IP detail records, and call detail records, remained encrypted throughout its lifecycle. Accomplishing this for our customer was a pivotal moment for the company. After a successful implementation, we decided to focus on providing our unparalleled FHE solution to enterprises and ISVs looking to build secure applications that ensure data protection at all times.

What excites you about what you’re building?

We’ve built an FHE product that overcomes many challenges that other FHE providers have not been able to address. In recent years, many companies have touted FHE as the ultimate answer to continuous encryption—the dream cryptographic technique—because it promises to transform data security, keeping information encrypted at all times, even during processing. But previous iterations of FHE have had their share of challenges, including performance bottlenecks, data expansion and scalability issues, exorbitant costs, and a lack of compatibility with other systems. No other company has been able to deliver FHE without these problems. With our world-class team of developers, DataKrypto has solved these challenges through a unique, symmetric encryption approach. Our FHE product is tens of millions of times faster than our nearest competitors operating on encrypted data! I know that sounds crazy, but when you’re talking about the difference between several hours or even days with other solutions versus nanoseconds with ours, the difference is mind-boggling. At one point, I asked our team to develop a minor feature within the product that would require modification to the codebase. They pushed back on this request as it would require one extra CPU cycle, making us slower by a few nanoseconds. That’s just one example of how passionate everyone here is about delivering the fastest and most secure FHE in the world.

What has been your biggest challenge when growing your startup?

Currently, our main focus is to educate the market—and more specifically, developers—about why it’s vital to ensure data protection at all stages of its lifecycle, and how to do that. Protecting data at rest and in motion isn’t enough. Most companies don’t realize that there are many critical gaps in data encryption that must be addressed. The latest breach against major U.S. broadband companies highlights existing security systems’ failures to protect personally identifiable information (PII), critical data, and systems supporting LEA investigations. Unfortunately, it is just the latest painful example of why companies must take urgent action to secure their data with FHE. Unless they do, we’ll continue to see large-scale, high-stakes breaches take a financial and reputational toll on the companies that businesses and consumers rely on. At DataKrypto, our mission is to compel companies to understand these issues and take necessary steps, and to make it clear that not all FHE is the same. As we continue to solve critical challenges for our customers, we will share their success stories and advance this narrative in the coming months.

What are your future plans for your startup?

Data growth is exponential and shows no signs of stopping. As the frequency and scale of data breaches continue to climb, data protection regulations become tighter and more stringent. With this backdrop, the critical need for robust, continuous encryption solutions is soaring. Our North Star is that data privacy and security are a human right. This concept is driving unprecedented growth within our organization. I’ve had numerous conversations with customers, prospects, and industry analysts who validate our purpose and solution. They, like me, believe that DataKrypto is ideally positioned to address vital market gaps and help organizations eliminate the daunting data breach threat vector. As we continue to set new industry benchmarks, we will lead the data security revolution, ensuring that data is protected at all times.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

My LinkedIn is at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravisrivatsav/, and they can also follow DataKrypto at https://www.linkedin.com/company/datakrypto/. Or on X at https://x.com/datakrypto. This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!