Slik Protect: Helping startups keep user data private

It is commonly said that ‘Digital privacy is a myth’. This is largely due to the many data breaches faced by companies and apps without the discrimination of the geographical location, size, and sector.

One of the most recent and shocking data breaches would have to be that of Big Basket that let loose the user information of 20 million users from email ids and phone numbers to home addresses. Such a widespread data leak could have been prevented with the stringent use of a data security platform.

Aimed at helping companies like big basket protect their data base that is usually filled with large and sensitive data, Slik Protect was set up in 2021 by Arpit Agarwal and Charvi Agarwal. The data security tech company helps startups detect, prioritize, mitigate, and avert business risks through comprehensive backups and vulnerability scanning.

The process is simple and all encompassing; once an individual or company logs into the platform and gives the necessary permissions, Slik Protect scans the company’s entire system using the inbuilt technology. The scan reveals any public security policy, any public buckets which are configured, or even if an employee has been given some unintended access to a project. Once these problems are detected and its potential risk is analyzed, the company is alerted.

Now that the problems have been listed, Slik Protect also provides its clients with steps on how to fix the detected problems. Additionally, it also has a service where clients can reach out to Slik solution experts where they provide a white collar service to help fix those security issues.

The duo specifically decided to keep the target audience as startups and small businesses. “Most of our competitors focus on Fortune 500 companies and they don’t provide self service solutions which small businesses can afford.”, co-founder Charvi Agarwal said. “Startups need an easy to configure and affordable solution," she added.

Apart from data scanning, it also supports applications, code, and database backups along with cloud infrastructure scanning. The third-party platform used for data backing services is built to optimize scale and security. 

Slik Protect offers two pricing options, both in the form of monthly subscriptions plans. The first one is $69 per month and the second is $299 per month.

Based out of the US as well as India, the company considers these two countries as its biggest markets. “The US market is a little bit more mature than the Indian market in terms of education about data privacy. People in the Indian market are aware that data security is a huge issue, but it is not their first priority.” Charvi told Entrackr.

The company majorly sees repeat clients from the health tech, edtech, and manufacturing markets. Without revealing the financial numbers, Charvi said that the company raised its pre-seed round in January last year. 

According to a US cyber security company India faced the second most tech exposure breaches in 2022 with a total of 2.29 billion records being exposed in 2022. That is a large amount of personal data that has now been exposed, these include phone numbers, email ids, IP addresses, personal addresses, medical records etc. these large number of data breaches happening every year calls for the need of stringent data protection in every platform.