We caught up with Sudesh Kumar of Kapalya, a member of ICE71 Accelerate’s fourth cohort.

Q: Tell us more about yourself.

I’m Sudesh Kumar, founder and CEO of Kapalya. We started Kapalya in Honolulu, Hawaii, but since 2018, we have moved to Berkeley, California which is in the San Francisco Bay Area in the US.

Q: What inspired you to start your startup? What is your goal or dream for your startup?

It all started when I was tasked by the Hawaii State CIO to protect the 2016 presidential elections data from getting hacked. During that process, I discovered that no vendor had a comprehensive encryption management solution, so we decided to build such a solution and that was the inception point of Kapalya.

Q: What is the problem you want to solve with your product or solution? Tell us more about your solution.

The main problem we are solving is encryption key management across any organization, regardless of where that organization’s data resides – be it on laptops, desktops, smartphones, tablets, public clouds, virtual desktop environments and enterprise file-servers. We call it the Encryption Management Platform (EMP).

Q: Who might find use for your solution?

Since our inception was from the government, they are first target customers. However, our solution is good to be used by any industry and vertical, as all of them are susceptible to ransomware attacks – these include healthcare, legal firms, software development companies, accounting firms, financial services, oil and gas, manufacturing, logistics, insurance companies, to name a few.

Q: What have you enjoyed the most being a part of the ICE71 Accelerate programme?

Our biggest value derived from the ICE71 program is the level of connections made so quickly within SingTel, NUS, Trustwave, CSA and NCL. All of these are extremely valuable partnerships for us, which would have been very difficult to obtain on our own.

Watch Kapalya pitch at ICE71 Accelerate 4 Virtual Demo Day on 25th June!

Learn more about Kapalya at kapalya.com