The startup is looking to expand into markets such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines
(L-R) Appknox Founders Harshit Agarwal, Prateek Panda and Subho Halder
Singapore-based XYSec Labs, owner of Appknox, a mobile security solution for enterprises and app developers, has raised S$875,000 (US$650,000) in pre-Series A round of funding led by SeedPlus — a new seed-stage VC fund backed by Jungle Ventures, Infocomm Investments, Accel Partners, and Ratan Tata’s RNT Associates.
With the newly-infused capital, Appknox has launched its cloud-based mobile security solution for businesses in Southeast Asia. The startup is now looking to expand into countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines in the region.
“Southeast Asia is one of the fastest growing regions in the world in terms of Internet economy. Research by Google and Temasek shows that the digital economy will grow to around US$200 billion by 2025. With the growth of e-commerce and digital payments, security will be the most important pillar of support. With the governments of Singapore and Malaysia announcing their Smart Nation objectives, now is the best time for businesses to start planning security on a regular basis,” said Harshit Agarwal, Co-founder and CEO of Appknox.
How does Appknox work?
“It’s actually pretty simple,” Agarwal told e27. “Imagine you are Grab. All you have to do is log into your account on Appknox and either upload your application (.apk or .ipa) or just paste the URL of your app from the app store and Appknox will quickly run the security analysis for you. We have a three-stage analysis process – static analysis, dynamic analysis and finally behavioural analysis. We execute the application through 80 test cases. In short, using Grab as an example, you do not have to worry about sharing your source code with us.”
All this is done through a cloud-based emulation engine that runs the app and then analyses it using data flow algorithms. “Hence, by the time your developer can grab a coffee and come back, Appknox would have found security issues that he/she can start working on,” he explained.
Launched last year in India by Agarwal, Subho Halder (CTO) and Prateek Panda (CMO), Appknox enables businesses to run security analysis on cloud-based emulation engines without having to share any source code. Users can just go ahead and point to the URL of any app on the app store and Appknox will provide results within a few minutes.
Appknox’s automated dynamic emulation engine for the iOS platform allows businesses to tackle challenges faced with analysing iOS applications.
With around 70 customers, Appknox is currently working with some of the top e-commerce and payments businesses like Paytm, Times Internet, BigBasket and CitrusPay in India. In Singapore, it is already working with companies like Redmart and HOOQ.
A SaaS product, Appknox is available as a monthly or annual subscription basis.
Appknox is an alumnus of JFDI Asia and Microsoft Accelerator in Bangalore.
A report by Gartner suggests that by 2017, more than 75 per cent of mobile apps will fail basic security checks. Appknox recently conducted a study of over 100,000 apps in Google Play Store and found more than 85 per cent of them to be failing basic security checks.
Ninety per cent of mobile apps in Singapore do not adequately declare what consumer data is collected or how it is used, potentially falling foul of Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA).
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