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Interview with Karthik Krishnan, Founder and CEO at Concentric
Interview with Karthik Krishnan, Founder and CEO at Concentric
Karthik Krishnan, founder and CEO at Concentric.ai

Karthik Krishnan, founder and CEO at Concentric.ai talks about how their AI-powered solutions can discover and protect unstructured data.

1. Tell us how you came to be the CEO at Concentric. How much of your typical day is involved in innovating AI tech for your customers?

I’ve been a part of the security industry for years, at HPE, Niara, PGP and Juniper Networks. I met with lots of customers and every one of them – and I do mean every one – was struggling to secure their unstructured data. They were trying to use DLP or Data Access Governance tools to do it but the state of the art there was pretty miserable.

At the same time, I’d been keeping tabs on the AI space. At one point I realized that natural language processing had become accurate and granular enough to replace the rules and policies people were using to discover and categorize their data. So our co-founders, Madhu Shashanka and Shankar Subramanium, and I put the solution together. I guess we are an old-school startup – we’re innovating to build a better mousetrap that solves problems we deeply understand.

In a startup, the product is the company, so innovation takes up nearly all my time. Of course, now that we have a product in the market I’m spending more time on the Sales and Marketing side, but even then I’m taking what I learn from the field and using it to innovate the product.

2. What are the applications or rather opportunities you seek to have with your product?

We focus on data access governance for unstructured data, which includes all the documents, presentations, contracts, reports, PII/PCI and other business-critical information that, at least right now, is only as secure as content owners choose to make it. For example, we know our current work-from-home environment has led to an explosion of link-sharing – even for really sensitive information. Users create those links, and they’re often unrestricted and last forever. That’s handy for users but not a great practice for data security. It can lead to expensive fines, reputational damage, privacy violations, and all the other consequences of data loss.

Read More about Karthik Krishnan, founder and CEO on our Website.

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