Chennai: US-based 4theONE, a non-profit organization dedicated to finding and rescuing children who are missing or trafficked, recently used a digital forensic toolkit of software firm Exterro to trace a teenage girl in Texas.
Exterro is the brainchild of Bobby Balachandran, a Coimbatore native who did his undergraduate degree in computer science from Government College of Technology in Coimbatore. Balachandran launched the company from a garage in Portland, but its portfolio of legal, governance and risk compliance software is made from its R&D centre in his native city.
"Our customers’ expectations are very high, and hence we decided to build a top-notch R & D centre in India," says Balachandran. "Rather than going to Bangalore or Chennai or Hyderabad, I felt like there were a lot of people who had left Coimbatore, even from my class, because hey didn’t have many options. But the quality of life, the weather, everything is great about Coimbatore," he adds.
The team we have here is top notch and as valuable as engineers from Stanford or Berkeley in the Silicon Valley. People think when it comes to India, it’s only people who code, but we broke that whole cycle. We have a full innovation engine, like identifying what problems customers have," he says.
The company today has a staff of around 300 in Coimbatore playing a key role in building software for a crucial segment of risk for corporate and governments today – data risk. "We are a SaaS platform. So we help the companies deal with data privacy issues, cybersecurity compliance issues, litigation management issues, privacy issues, forensic investigation aspects and a variety of other things."
It’s not just the big corporations who recognize the value of digital forensics today. Government agencies world over are users. "The biggest corporations in the world use our solution, the law enforcement agencies, all the three letter acronyms in the US, and 90% of state law enforcement in India work with us," says Balachandran. "Our technology was also used in the Philippines by Operation Safe escape, where they used the tool to save 1,500 young girls from being trafficked," he adds.
The company, which has employees in more than 12 countries, and more than 3,000 customers worldwide, remained bootstrapped for a long time till it raised investment from Leeds Equity Partners in 2018. Given the SaaS firm’s strong profitability and unit economics, it is also gearing up to be the next Tamil Nadu-made product to list in the US markets soon, after Freshworks.
We are working on a secondary round of funding in a pre-IPO round now to create more dry powder. We expect to go public in the first quarter of next year," he says. "We did a couple of acquisitions, we are targeting another three this year, before going public."
Exterro has engineers in America, UK and Europe, but most of them are in India. Is the decision to build their product out of Coimbatore proving to be a tough call as they scale?
Balachandran says it was the most logical decision for him. "I know a lot of smart people in my hometown, so I felt like I wanted to tap into that," he said, adding that it was not a cost-based decision." Exterro recently expanded their
Coimbatore centre and is also looking at places like Tirunelveli for setting up new centres.
https://m-timesofindia-com.cdn.ampp...around-the-world/amp_articleshow/91424139.cms
