Mach37 Spring Class 2016 Interview: Unblinkr

Mancy Sanghavi, Unblinkr Founder

  

What opportunity did you recognize that led to the founding of Unblinkr?

Mancy Sanghavi: 250 million cars will join the Internet of Things by 2020. Cars are running millions of lines of code and are just as susceptible to hacking as any computer network. Advanced driver assistance and connectivity features increase threat vectors on the connected vehicle. We identified an opportunity to make cars secure.

What specific value does addressing that opportunity/problem provide for your customers?

Sanghavi: Automotive Industry insiders acknowledge connected cars need to be secure from outside hackers. Through the publicity car hacking has received recently, consumers want to know their vehicles are safe. There are plenty of discussions on how to secure the connected car. Our product provides an answer to that question. By using our solution, car manufacturers can stay competitive and offer more advanced connectivity features for consumers.

Why aren’t current solutions addressing this opportunity/problem effectively?

Sanghavi: Cars today are infinitely more complex than the Model T designed by Henry Ford in 1908. Automotive companies have never had to think like technology companies in the past, and they are having to play catch up. Their design times have to be more responsive. We don’t have to play catch up because our team has been dedicated to this problem for over 5 years.

What makes your approach different and better from existing approaches?

Sanghavi: The connected vehicle space is new and there is no clear leader in aftermarket automotive cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is crucial in order for the market to adopt driverless cars. There are a few startups offering point solutions whereas we are taking a holistic approach. We believe in intelligent data by bringing context to increase awareness of the situation, thereby enabling us to make better decisions.

What about your (team’s) background puts you in a unique position to succeed?

Sanghavi: Our team has done research on the security and privacy concerns of these types of advanced technologies. We have bid on and received research grants to examine connectivity and have spent time in labs researching internal car networks. We conduct black box testing and pen testing on cars.

What one aspect of the Mach37 programs did you personally find most beneficial?

Sanghavi: The Mach37 program is incredibly beneficial and I highly recommend it. The 14-week program gives startups a unique chance to interact with experts and learn how to run a business from start to exit. Startups hone their message and learn the building blocks to take a litmus test of whether their idea can succeed in the marketplace. Mach37 helps you build your boat before they launch you into the waters.

Are there any adjacent industries transformed by your solution?

Sanghavi: Imagine summoning a driverless car via smartphone, revolutionizing taxi and parking industries. Targeted in-car advertising creates revenue opportunities for telecom and marketing industries. Insurance is getting ready for the day of driverless cars and when people aren’t paying car insurance anymore. Our solution helps track history and prove whether a car has been hacked. This is valuable information for insurers.  However, these disruptions come with challenges. The FBI is concerned that driverless cars are a terrorist target. Centralization means more vulnerability and creates user privacy concerns.

What are the key market/economic forces in your industry?

Sanghavi: Over 35,000 people in the US die in road crashes each year. Driverless technology is the hope that the number will become zero. But we are replacing human error with a machine. If that machine becomes hacked, that is dangerous for the families riding in the car. One day anti-hacking software installed on a car will be mandatory, the way seatbelts and airbags are mandatory safety elements today. An industry driver is that revenues from connectivity are expected to increase sixfold from approximately $30 billion in 2014 to approximately $170 billion in 2020. Possible legislative mandates like SPY Car Act may fuel demand for Unblinkr product. An Executive Order mandates all government vehicles to address threat vectors by 2017. The EU eCall law will drive demand for the product overseas. Learn more about Unblinkr here.

Mach37 Spring '16 Class Interview: PCPursuit

Robert Walker

CEO and founder

 

What opportunity did you recognize that led to the founding of PCPursuit?

Robert Walker: There are a couple of things going on in information security that are really important. Too many information security products only tell you there is a problem after your data has already been stolen. I have seen a few things in my career that are technologies that can prevent problems from happening in the first place, but they are not easy to use and are typically expensive. We recognized that we could make physical systems and digital systems more secure if they could just talk to each other. It’s really never been done before and that’s what we are changing by providing a proactive security solution that is inexpensive and easy to deploy.  

What makes your approach different and better from existing approaches?

Walker: Simplicity. You don’t have to roll this out to every asset in your enterprise. You can deploy one tiny piece of software on your Active Directory domain controller and it can protect your entire enterprise. This uses the exact same framework that Microsoft uses themselves. Most solutions don’t do it this way because it’s extremely hard to do.One specific thing our technology doesn’t do is require you to deploy agents to each PC in your enterprise. We have a server that sits between your physical control systems and your Windows Active Directory domain controllers. That PCPursuit software asks if a user badges in and if so, when and where. We report that back and based on what the enterprise administrator wants, we can log it, we can send an email to their manager or restrict access.  

What specific value does addressing that opportunity/problem provide for your customers?

Walker: PCPursuit enables enterprises to get considerably better security out of the assets they already own. We make the stuff they have better and we do it very inexpensively. It’s a massive improvement for a very low cost.  

Why aren’t current solutions addressing this problem effectively?

Walker: Because they are not thinking outside their own boxes. Physical security solutions only think about the physical side. Digital security only considers their own boxes. We took it up a level to look at both pieces.  However, there is another dimension to consider. The technology is really hard to build. The concept is simple, but the execution isn’t easy.  

What about your (team’s) background puts you in a unique position to succeed?

Walker: Both my co-founder and I worked at Microsoft. I was there as a full-time employee for 13 years. My co-founder has worked at Microsoft for many years as a consultant. So we both have very deep exposure to Microsoft technology and we know how to implement it in a way that very few people understand. It's not that no one else can do this. It's that few people understand as well as we do how Windows was designed. 

What makes this an exciting opportunity for you?

Walker: The thing that I think is most exciting about what we are doing is that we are one of those really rare solutions that can help make your enterprise tremendously more secure than it presently is and at a very low cost. By putting these two pieces of technology together, PCPursuit delivers two key benefits that address two intractable problems:

• It discourages employees from tailgating into buildings. If you can’t get any work done because your login won’t authenticate, you won’t tailgate to get in. If we change the psychology in an office to "always badge in" instead of "avoid it," it changes behavior. Then not badging in becomes the anomaly.
• We also make physical presence another factor for authentication. Passwords aren’t secure. Even if you have to change them every several weeks. People forget them. They write them down so they don’t forget them making them easier to steal. With PCPursuit, if you didn’t badge in, you can’t get access. If your password got phished, that hacker in Russia won’t be physically in your building and can’t get access from inside your enterprise network. If someone found your password, they can’t use it. And we can do it for one-tenth of the cost of other tools in the market. You don’t have to buy tokens or other tools, just install our software on a single server and connect it to Active Directory and your enterprise is immediately more secure.

PCPursuit represents the first example of a simple approach to pairing physical security with digital security. It will have the biggest impact on securing the enterprise since automatic Windows updates. This is the kind of stuff that actually works. Stuff that’s really simple. You just make a little tweak and people don’t have to change the way they work, but it still makes a big difference. It turns out that the technology is hard, but the implementation is simple and effective.  

What one aspect of the Mach37 programs did you personally find most beneficial?

Mach37 is really well-connected and is the only accelerator focused solely on information security. Their specialization in information security means everything they do is geared to this field and that is very valuable. In addition, they understand selling to the enterprise. There is a big emphasis in the program on selling and that is not a natural skill for engineers which is the background of most of the founders.