Despite COVID Setback, Innefu Labs Expansion Plan Intact The start-up is eyeing different geographies as well as different market segments as they believe India still lags behind when it comes to securing the digital space.
By Debroop Roy
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Innefu Labs, founded in 2010 by IT engineers Tarun Wig and Abhishek Sharma, have been impacted heavily due to the COVID-19 outbreak with three of its big projects being shelved. But that has not deterred the founders to plan expansion into different geographies as well as different market segments as they believe India still lags behind when it comes to securing the digital space.
"We are continuously introducing the latest AI (artificial intelligence) models for feature extraction for different data sources including satellite imagery as well. The models are regularly getting trained on increasingly large volumes of data thereby achieving higher accuracy. We are now in the midst of introducing our technology from national security to the financial fraud analytics sector," said 34-year-old Wig.
Innefu—which develops products related analytics and cybersecurity—works with large enterprises, defence agencies and law enforcement agencies in India. The startup has even worked with the Indian army.
One of the biggest challenges faced by the startup was lack of adoption of the technology in the customer segment. "Apart from that, finding the right talent pool with relevant domain expertise along with data scientist background was extremely difficult," said Wig, adding that the problem is eased to an extent now.
The startup uses multiple AI models working on different datasets to extract relevant intelligence automatically and correlate all different datasets into one big data repository for predictive modeling. These AI models are used to predict fraud in the financial sector—insurance, banking and finance— law enforcement and national security.
However, the path to profitability remains a challenge. "I think it's a lot to do with persistence and longevity. The longer you can survive on your product, the better chances you give yourself to grow exponentially," said Wig.
Innefu won the 'Security Product Company of the Year' by Data Security Council of India (DSCI) in 2018. DSCI is a not-for-profit industry body on data protection in India which has been set up by NASSCOM. In 2017, the startup was classified as one of the top five companies in the cyber excellence globally.
