Seceon Founder Chandra Pandey on Building an AI-Driven Cybersecurity Company and Threat Landscape

There is no kill switch in AI models, you know, your trust, governance, and then security, all of those are really critical. And that's where you have to keep all of those whether it's a shadow as well as any models being used in the organization have to be watched very carefully. The biggest challenge in the cyber security will be created by automated And very sophisticated attacks, which may not be coming from a highly organized group. They even may start coming from the individuals. And those attacks will be at their scale. Welcome to India News. Our guest today is Chandra Pandit. He is the founder and CEO of Sekhya Inc. On November 14th, he will be honored as Businessperson of the Year 2026 at New England Choice Awards Gala. We are going to talk to him about his entrepreneurial journey. what we can learn from his experience. Before we talk about your company Sekyan, let's first talk about your professional journey. You have worked with Lucent, Juniper, 3Com, and many more tech giants of the time. And you had a very high, very rising career in those companies as far as the technology is concerned. How was that experience and what made you start your own company? I was pretty lucky that I got to start my career in one of the very innovative places called CDOT. Then I had the opportunity to work at the IBM Telecom Lucent did a startup with a few of the top-notch people which got bought by Ciena. And then I ended up joining Juniper and there also had the opportunity to see the founder as well as, you know, it's like a lot of innovative people who are driving the cutting edge innovation into the networking field as well as, you know, cybersecurity as well. You get to see the thing is like, you know, and you get to see the things which are happening and you know that, hey, you can do it and you can do it much better or really well at the first clip that drives you to kind of like, hey, I want to go and make this thing happen. And those were the driving force that, hey, I can do it and I can do it like better than anybody else out there in the world, you know. So if I have to ask you one common goal or motto or objective for all these giants, what will be the one common thing among all those companies you saw? Yeah, one biggest thing I'll say was that these companies had innovative genes into their culture. Some of those companies which kind of like, you know, made out really good into the long term. If you didn't have the innovation and if there was a culture was not to drive the innovation, then you might have one hit pony and then after that you may disappear. So one thing you always learn any of the startup that look in the high tech startup. Anything you do that has a shelf-life, it cannot be constant forever and especially in certain sector there is nothing called even the self-life because that self-life people used to call it like, you know, three years, five years. In cybersecurity, that shelf-life might be not even a year, you know, because there is not a fixed functionality you work on. You are working on something which threat actors are innovating each and every day. So you have to match up to them. So if you really want something where you want to keep on driving the innovations and you have that passion and drive. To do something good out there, cyber security is the marketplace you want to be. So you started your cyber security company, Sekyan, in 2014. 2015. 2015. So at that time, I think the cyber security concern and the problems were different. And today, because of AI and all, it has become much more complicated. So, the solution which you had thought of in 2015. How that problem and solution has evolved over the last 10, 15 years? That's a great question. So if you look into even in 2015, we talked all along that, you know, even though AI was not very common at that time, what AI is being talked about today, it used to be called NLP only at that point. And we were using ML, AI and dynamic threat model into our platform from the day one. So even 2015, we were doing the AI and that AI is not what you talk about, you know, it's like these frontier models and like what you have today. It was more domain specific that, you know, you know, the domains, you know, exactly what are the set of the things have to be controlled and all that. So we started with that. Even that time to capture kind of like those attacks which were happening into multiple steps and stages, those you needed ML and AI. Now, fast forward, like, you know, 10, 11 years into the future. Now, if you look into your attacks are very sophisticated and those threat actors and and APTs, they are creating something which can Not only break the things into seconds, sometimes even milliseconds, and also it can destroy a lot of things. So not only you are worried about that, hey, you're kind of going to lose all of your intellectual property as well as, you know, it's like your trade secret and you may bring down the operations and all that. But these ones can even cause those damage within a few seconds, sometimes in a few milliseconds, depending on what they are trying to do. So it has changed. The game has changed completely. So now in that context, game changer, why cybersecurity is not considered to be an integral part of any company today or any new startup? They focus on, of course, you know, the capital is important. I think that... They focus on infrastructure, office, etc. But cybersecurity has not yet been considered as that integral part of any business. Why is that if the threats are so serious? Yeah, see, I think there is definitely a lot of awareness issue there. That's right. People don't understand that, you know, for any organization, If you do not have a cybersecurity part of your first thought, there is a very good chance because of some low cost of like, you know, breaching you and stealing your intellectual property and all that. Just to give you an idea, some of the threat actors, they have to be less than 1 in 1 million. to be successful to have a very profitable ROI on their investment. Mm-hmm. Just to give you an idea, if you look into today's market and the market, the way it works is there are people who are after just getting the kind of like, you know, access to your environment. Then they sell it out to the other people who come in and find all of your crown jewels and everything since you have it in there. Then they send it to somebody else in there. And the thing is, the cost of having their infrastructure and also creating their attack vectors is so low that they have to be successful less than 0.001%, to be highly successful. So the game has changed. So cost has changed as well as even creating the threat. Like vectors, how to kind of go after, discover those, change it out. So now it is like, you know, people does not have to have a lot of resources to have a successful operation and breach and all that. And they are not looking for, hey, I just have to get a million dollar payment or $10 million payment. Now, sometimes if somebody is stealing something, which is kind of the thing, even if they get $10,000, it's good enough for them because there is ROI. Other side, if you look into if somebody steals your intellectual property and the data and the data and like your trade secret. Though you cannot even put the value that, you know, whether it's 1 billion, 10 billion, 20 billion, if you have like, you know, your intellectual property, let's say take it as like, you know, you have a medicine discovery that gets stolen, you are probably going to lose almost like tens and hundreds of billions of dollars in some cases, that's right? And so you have to be really, really careful Be careful because cyber security definitely. It's not people a lot of people may think it's like too costly for a startup or even a small business to have. That is not the case. As long as you are aware and you want to have a cyber security, not only the second, there might be many other companies out there who can provide you that options. And with all these new kind of advances coming in there, you can easily go ahead and make sure that your intellectual property as well as, you know, it's like your trade secret and your personal information, health care information, all kept. In a safe place and not exposed to the things where you want to kind of like not it be seen out there. Chandra, as we are talking, the pace of change in technology, in AI, cyber security, capital, money, changing so rapidly today. And with your background, working with all the giant tech companies and now starting your own company for more than ten years. What advice you will give to a today's entrepreneur who wants to go and try his or her luck? Yeah, no, I think that's a really like loaded question. First, I'll say because you see, a lot of we can break it in parts. So let's start wherever you feel. Yeah, no, I understand. So And so... first thing is like, you know, you have to see if you are going to create something. If that there is a market for it and then people are willing to pay for it because you can create something which might be phenomenal but if nobody wants to pay for it then that is something which you are going to regret it you know so you always have to think about that you create something which you will be able to at least go and make some money. And that money part does not have to wait for a very long, long period of time. You have to see the success into within your first, like, you know, year or two years. It doesn't have to be that you go for three, four years before you kind of figure it out that whether anybody needs it or not. So that's one thing, because as you pointed out in the high tech industry is changing very fast. So you have to see the light at the end of the tunnel, Thank you. whether it's like, it doesn't have to be very bright light, but at least you see something. So you know that you are on the right path and now you can grow it from there. So definitely innovation is the key, but... Even beyond the innovation, you have to see that, hey, there is people who are willing to pay for it because you are solving a problem, which people have also come to the realization that there is a problem. It's not nice to have. It is just something they must need. For their kind of like, you know, business as well. So that's something I'll say definitely look into that. So you are saying that number one is solve the problem. Yeah. And number two is make sure that you make money. Yeah. revenue generation Yeah. What are the two, three other advice you will give? Yeah, definitely you have to kind of surround yourself with a good support system. So you have to have a good people around you. who does not just want to kind of like you know uh be there in the beginning and then as you start running into the challenges which you will always run into they start bailing out because that's not going to be uh like you know uh good because that will discourage you as well so you have to have a great set of the people around you If you are doing something which requires multiple people around you as well, then definitely see you have to be passionate about what you want to do. So don't just think about that, you know, it's like, hey, there's a lot of money. But if you are not passionate and don't get tired by doing what you are doing there, because if you keep on getting tired with what you are doing in there, that basically your passion is not there. Because if you are passionate about something, It doesn't matter. You don't get tired and you don't see that whether I work for 10 hours, 12 hours or I was kind of there for 16 hours, you pretty much lose the track of the time. So that is also has to be very important. That didn't mean that, you know, it's like you sacrifice everything in your life, but the passion has to be there and you have to believe in you are solving a problem, which definitely. adds significant value to the society if it then adds significant value to the society you will give up sooner or later. When you started Sekhyaan what was the one thing today you are very proud of or you said oh this is the I really did it the right way at Sekhyaan. Yeah, I mean, look, one thing I'll say that we chose a problem to solve and which we knew that problem is kind of like not going away. So cybersecurity, even today, the problem we are seeing today. That's problem tomorrow will be the ones like, you know, a step or two steps, like much more complex than what it is today. So one of the things is like cyber security gives you kind of like, you know, your brain always at the work. And it's a pretty kind of a interesting thing that, hey, if you kind of like, you know, really love that, you never get tired about it. And one thing I'll say that, you know, means like love. One thing I'm proud of that, you know, we went into the cyber security knowing that there will be a lot of like new upcoming challenges and in cyber security, you might be hottest company today. There is a chance you might disappear. Like, within a short period of time, because the pace is so fast, the way industry is changing, and then other side is changing so fast. So, you have to keep on evolving and innovating. Without that, you know, it's like… One mistake you think you made in Sekhyaan? Yeah, I will say definitely one mistake I have made and I'm still kind of I'll say that, you know, I have not have enough correction done is you see, I come from the like R&D background. So definitely solving the problem gets me too excited where I made the mistake. I did not bring Like, you know, like what you call is like a big professional sales team from the beginning. And the reason was basically we had some success with the partners and all that. So we never had an opportunity to kind of like, you know, seriously think that, hey, we should have a phenomenal sales team around that. Because you can have the best platform in the industry, best cyber security efficacy and efficiency you deliver. But the best marketing and sales always wins. And that is the one major mistake every company does. He does the, the, you know, The sales and marketing comes always towards the end. And by the time they realize already they have lost two, three years already. Yeah. So now let's come back to another issue which I wanted to ask you. He's, um... So in today's context, for example, you have been already You mentioned, you know, any such company can disappear any day or any tech company can disappear because the fast changes. You have been in business for over 10 years now. Yes. And so you are still there in the marketplace and you are growing. What is the one thing which makes Sekian different? from other cyber security companies? Yeah, so I think that's a great question, because as I mentioned, the second from the day one believe that to solve the cyber security problem, you need the platform and platform. What does it mean is everything has to work on the common data format fabric and it has to be brought in together to close the cyber security tool gaps. And that's something we are very proud of. And look, we are part of the certain fabric where we are like at the national SOC of the complete country. And there are many of those basically looks like going to be the case as well. We process in certain cases more than multi-million events per second. That kind of scale, not many companies can talk about it. And I'll say some of those things definitely keeps us kind of going. We have to keep on driving the innovation because as I mentioned, threat actors, APTs, they go after each other every second. And now with the automation of what AI has brought in there. That is even taken it to the next level. So the problem we solve is like not going to be like, you know, getting any smaller, the problem is keeps on growing. And what I'll say is like, definitely, we are extremely proud of that, you know, the way we started our architecture, we kind of like we have built upon it, we don't have to restart anything there. And that is something I'll say that, you know, the vision and the strategy we had from the day one had served us really well. Now, Sekian is also present in many countries. If you can just talk about your network. where your services are being used. Yeah so we are present around I'll say almost 60 to 70 countries in there through the partners. We definitely don't have people into all of those countries but we have partners and those partners are very passionate partners because they have sometimes tens and hundreds of people working on our platform 24/7. We connect with them, we get all the feedback from them, we kind of like train them. Release comes out every month, so they have a lot of input they feed into. Chandra, as you said earlier that you have your presence in 60-70 countries around the world. How many customers and what type of customers do you have? That's a great question. So we have more than 10,000 customers around the globe with the different sectors. So financial sectors, manufacturing, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, educational. It's like we have a lot of higher education customers as well in there. So, similarly, I mentioned the BFSI, those customers are quite a bit, government customers are there. I already mentioned that some national level stacks are built on our platform as well. So, it varies quite a bit, all the way from the government to any other private sector you can think about. And it also scales from Some of the global Fortune 500 companies, all the way to companies which might have only 5 to 10 people to 100 people in the organization as well. Now, if you can also talk a little bit about your growing up, where did you grow up and what brought you to US? Yeah, personal journey. Yeah, I understand. So I definitely grew up in a village in Varanasi district. It's a small village. I was there till eighth grade. After that, I moved to a city, Varanasi, to do my high school. 8th to 12th grade and then I did my... So which high school was that in Varanasi? That was Queen's College. That's a very well-known college, yes? Yeah, I was in the Queen's College. I was pretty lucky that I got selected at some state level competition and all that. So that's the reason I was into that Queen's College. And then after that, I did my B.Tech. And the first job, I got into C-DOT. So C-DOT was a pretty innovative place to go in and do the R&D innovation. And that gave me a lot of exposure that, you know, it's like, hey, if you want to do R&D, how you want to work on and all that. And then after that, I came to work for IBM USA, Austin, Texas. And which year did you come to the U.S.? Yeah, I came into 1995. 1995, okay. And you also did some higher ed here in the U.S. too? Yeah, so I did like my MBA from Northeastern University. Yeah, so I was pretty lucky that I did my MBA in high-tech innovation as well as finance. So they had definitely is not the standard. opportunity to do multiple one and they were pretty well known for the high-tech one so I did that one and then there were a couple great professor in the finance so it's like you know I said okay let's do that one as well so I did two majors during my MBA as well. Today, if you look at the technology market, anywhere you go, consumer, business-to-business, And there's a lot of problems are being solved by AI, and a lot of people are using it in almost every aspect of life you can think of. And also, AI is also creating And then to solve the problems, cyber security, other security people are also using AI too. So the whole perpetual cycle is keep going. a lot of problems as well. What is your take on that and what is the solution of that? Yeah, so it's a great question. So I'll say definitely AI is a great technology. But some of the, like not all of the frontier models, in the last two years, they removed all the guardrails. And pretty much AI has become that, hey, it wants to kind of like, you know, lock into the psychology of its user and how to keep that user happy. And in that process, it makes up the answer. It tells you the lie, whatever you want to kind of whatever you want to hear. Yeah. So that has gone too far. That's right. And basically, it's like competition drove to all the frontier model designers to do that and that has created a lot of cyber security problems as well or you can say in general it has created not only cyber security but Thank you very much. something which is basically is like not true and people In the believing it's true, you know, so that is a big problem now, how you kind of control that for that, you know, a few things is like, you know, we can talk about the cyber security, but other thing is like, you know, cyber security is something you are now what you're doing is you are creating a cage around those like, you know, models to make sure they are not kind of accessing what they are not supposed to access. They are not kind of like you know. uh telling you which is not the truth you know so you have to uh make sure that you know you put those kind of capability and filter and all that and they are not taking your data where it's not supposed to take so one thing is ai security another thing is very critical that the user have to understand that the models have been programmed to tell you what you want to hear so you if you're really doing some serious work and something you want to make sure that you question it otherwise if you don't question it you will just get what you thought you wanted to hear because it's a reasoning model it guesses what you love to kind of like hear and it will give you those so that is something you have to be really really careful that you know then fall into that Like, you know, self-fulfilling prophecy and all of a sudden, you know, you start believing. Self-fulfilling delusion. Yes, exactly, you know. Self-healing. Self-fulfilling delusions. You don't want to fall into that because that's what basically the AI is driving you into that direction. And that's basically the other thing is like, you know, as we were discussing earlier that These models have been given the parameters like that. So this is not something you can control. Because the parameters, once the model gets released, their parameters are set. Those parameters cannot be replaced. So now you as a cybersecurity company, you cannot even do anything with those parameters. Suppose you want to filter. Say I'm using Cybersecurity on my computer. I'm using AI, ChatGPT. And I ask a question. And ChatGPT gives me a fantastic answer. Oh, you are the best marketing strategist you have. What a wonderful job you have done. Is there any system which can come and tell us, you know what, this is, don't believe it is not true? Yeah, so I think that's like, that's a great question you asked. So one thing is what it is kind of giving you without... Kind of like going out of its way, you know, because you can decide that, hey, you know, it's like, hey, if something is just sitting in front of you and accessing the model and just gives you answer that, hey, you are the best and all that in there, cyber security might not have anything to play till you apply a policy that, you know, that, hey, anything coming back or something like that. Need to be re-validated or re-questioned. Okay. Okay. Okay. And if you ask the same question a different way, you might get an answer which you will be surprised. All of a sudden, you are the best marketing strategist. strategies and And then, you know, it's like you ask the... Am I really, you know, and then you get a different answer all together. So just like you have to keep that in mind, but that can be also done by a policy engine, which is part of the SAP security product. So sometimes you want to have that policy in the place. Another time is also you want to make sure that it does not go to the places where you do not want your Prompt your data to go out. So you can have policy, plus you can have a control over what data is being looked at. Excellent. Chandra, thank you again for your time. Thank you. And we'll see you on November 14th. Thank you.