From Zero Funding to India's Only Listed Cybersecurity Firm: Quick Heal

In this conversation, Sanjay Katkar, Founder, Quick Heal Technologies, India's only listed cybersecurity firm, breaks down 30 years of fighting hackers, the real mechanics of ransomware, and why your Gmail password may already be for sale on the dark web. Sanjay Katkar started debugging viruses on floppy disks as a college student in Pune in 1990, eventually building Quick Heal Technologies into India's only publicly listed cybersecurity company with over 25,000 channel partners, a ₹350 crore revenue run rate, and an enterprise security brand, Seqrite, that competes directly with CrowdStrike and SentinelOne in the Indian mid-market. In this episode with host Akshay Datt on Founder Thesis, Sanjay reveals the counterintuitive truth that being a small business does not make you safe - it often makes you the easiest backdoor into a much larger organisation, a tactic called supply chain attacks that is reshaping India cybersecurity risk for every SMB. He explains how the AIIMS ransomware attack involved months of silent reconnaissance before a single file was locked, how North Korea's Lazarus Group stole ₹89 crore from Cosmos Bank using coordinated ATM withdrawals across multiple countries, and why ransomware gangs actively protect their own brand reputation to ensure victims keep paying. With India's DPDP Act now law and AI enabling 10,000 personalised phishing emails per second, this episode arrives at the most consequential moment in India's digital security history. 👉How Quick Heal bootstrapped to ₹100 crore in revenue before raising a single rupee, and why Sequoia Capital approached them, not the other way around 👉Why the AIIMS ransomware attackers spent months silently mapping the hospital's entire infrastructure before locking every system in a single night 👉How hackers use one stolen password from a food delivery app to reset your Gmail, and then use Gmail to break into your bank account 👉What the difference between EPP, EDR, and XDR actually means in plain language, and why even a 10-person company needs to care about endpoint security India 👉Why India's geopolitical moment, combined with bans on Russian and Chinese cybersecurity products, is opening a genuine global opportunity for Quick Heal Technologies in Southeast Asia and the Middle East 👉How AI is replacing L1 and L2 SOC analyst jobs entirely, and what Sanjay Katkar believes will be left for humans to do in cybersecurity operations

You can listen to From Zero Funding to India's Only Listed Cybersecurity Firm: Quick Heal online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

From Zero Funding to India's Only Listed Cybersecurity Firm: Quick Heal is an episode from Founder Thesis by Akshay Datt.

This episode is 98:54 long.

This episode was published on May 4, 2026.

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