Deal focus: A digital protector for the cloud era

Singaporean cybersecurity company Horangi is older than the official Indonesian body responsible for fighting cybercrime. It was founded in 2016 by two ex-employees of US big data analytics player Palantir who chanced upon the word Horangi – which is Korean for tiger – while teaching at a Korean institute. Indonesia’s National Cyber & Encryption Agency (BSSN) was established a year later.

According to the BSSN, cyber-attacks rose more than eightfold year-on-year to 92 million in 2019. Growth could accelerate with the increasing adoption of cloud-based data systems. Google, Indonesia’s leading cloud data provider, has said it will launch its first local data center this year to meet rising demand.

“When we first started building the company, thinking about cybersecurity risk wasn't common at all,” says Horangi co-founder Paul Hadjy. “People now understand that managing it is an important part of doing business.”

Headquartered in Singapore, Horangi’s customers include the likes of Go-Jek in Indonesia, Ninja Van in the Philippines, and MoneySmart in Hong Kong. Technology start-ups are a logical target because many must pass cybersecurity assessments in order to close new funding rounds. Meeting compliance requirements set by anxious regulators also makes life easier for chief information security officers (CISO).

Horangi’s software product helps digital natives and traditional businesses understand the security vulnerabilities that may emerge when moving data onto public cloud infrastructure. Cloud hosting providers follow a shared responsibility model and therefore offer limited security, Hadjy says.

Customers that sign up for annual subscriptions are offered extra services such as penetration testing, security assessments, a virtual CISO, and cybersecurity training.

Last week, Indonesia-focused GP Provident Growth contributed $20 million in Series B funding to help Horangi expand its product line and workforce. Indonesia is a key market for the company and Hadjy expects continued growth in the market especially as older businesses have yet to transition to a cloud-based future.

However, awareness is growing after a year that saw external parties claim data breaches at local e-commerce platforms Tokopedia and Bukalapak. The latter admitted to the leak advertised by an ethical hacker but claimed there was no loss of financial data.

Provident, which is also an investor in leading start-ups like Traveloka and Gojek, is expected to open doors for Horangi. Staying on top of evolving compliance rules in order to build a locally compliant product will be Horangi’s responsibility.

Hadjy identifies an intimate knowledge of Southeast Asia’s regulatory landscape as a key differentiator for the company. Another is ownership of proprietary technology, with many other start-ups leveraging solutions built elsewhere. Having listed one product on the Amazon Web Services marketplace last yar, Horangi aspires to become globally competitive. Planned improvements include systems that allow users to track internal security performance.

“When clients deal with regulators, they need to have a history of how security is getting better over time,” Hadjy says. “As a security person, that's one of the hardest things to show to a regulator or to customers and our product helps them do that.”

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Singapore
• Provident Growth
• Cybersecurity