Operant AI Expands to India, Bringing Advanced AI Security Solutions

US-Based Operant AI Expands to India with AI Security Solutions

Illustration by Co-founders Priyanka Tembey, Vrajesh Bhavsar and Ashley Roof (left to right) Operant AI, a Silicon Valley-based deep-tech AI cybersecurity startup, has launched its operations in India to provide real-time security solutions for the country's rapidly growing AI sector. The company's expansion is driven by the increasing demand for robust security measures in industries like fintech, healthcare, and enterprise software. Having secured $13.5 million in Series A funding from venture capital firms Felicis and Sinewave, the startup has made a strategic entry into India. Operant AI founders Ashley Roof, Vrajesh Bhavsar and Priyanka Tembey aim to address the urgent need for AI security in India. "As Indian businesses scale their AI capabilities, security becomes a critical concern. We see a strong demand for real-time security solutions that protect sensitive data and ensure compliance with evolving regulations," Bhavsar, co-founder and CEO, told AIM. The startup is expanding on key technology and financial hubs in India, including Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Delhi-NCR. Bhavsar said that "these cities are strategic markets due to their strong ecosystems for fintech, BFSI, SaaS, and government-backed AI initiatives." The co-founder also expressed the company's plans to invest heavily in local partnerships with banks, financial institutions, and AI-driven enterprises. Given the country's focus on regulatory compliance, the startup aims to work closely with organisations to help them navigate AI security frameworks and ensure data protection. Operant AI's 3D Runtime Defense Platform offers critical cybersecurity capabilities to protect modern Indian software innovation and AI from attacks such as prompt injection, rogue agents, data poisoning, and data exfiltration. The platform's in-line auto-redaction capabilities ensure that sensitive data is automatically redacted before leaving a company's environment, addressing privacy concerns in industries like BFSI and FinTech. Operant AI is actively tapping into India's talent pool by hiring experts in AI security, cloud infrastructure, and real-time defence solutions. "For go-to-market roles, we are expanding our sales, partnerships, and customer success teams to drive enterprise adoption in India," added Bhavsar. The startup also aims to align with India's 'Make in India' initiative by providing AI-native security solutions that allow Indian enterprises to scale AI applications securely. As India accelerates AI adoption across industries, security must be built into the foundation. The startup aims to contribute to India's leadership in secure AI development and ensure that Indian enterprises remain globally competitive.

US-Based Operant AI Enters India To Help Enterprises Tackle Cyber Threats

The company operates an AI-focussed cybersecurity platform that helps enterprises secure cloud and AI applications from various threats Amid rising adoption of GenAI by Indian enterprises, Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity startup Operant AI, which claims to be the world's only runtime AI application defense platform, has announced its India entry. Founded by Vrajesh Bhavsar, Priyanka Tembey and Ashely Roof in 2021, Operant AI operates an AI-focussed cybersecurity platform that helps enterprises secure cloud and AI applications from various threats, including data exfiltration, prompt injection, and more, with a "3D" approach of discovery, detection, and defense. "At Operant, we've built a solution that does more than detect threats -- it actively protects sensitive data such as citizenship IDs, bank account numbers, and API keys in real time," Bhavsar said. The startup has raised $13.5 Mn till date from investors like Felicis, SineWave Ventures, Gaingels, Alumni Ventures, Calm Ventures, among others. It last raised $10 Mn in its Series A round in September 2024. Operant AI is currently in talks with several Indian entities based out of Bengaluru, Pune, and Ahmedabad to onboard as its clients, it said in a statement. The startup will hire a head of India and a team to serve Indian customers, with primary focus on banking, fintech, and AI-first companies, its cofounder and CEO Bhavsar told Inc42. Operant AI's entry into India comes at a time when the number of cyberattacks are increasing rapidly. In 2024, India became the second most affected nation in terms of cyberattacks, after the US. Last year, the country saw some major cybersecurity breaches, including data breach at BSNL, which compromised 278 GB of sensitive user data, data theft at broking platform Angel One, which affected 7.9 Mn customers, and $234 Mn worth cryptocurrency theft at WazirX. The Centre is taking necessary steps to overcome the frauds conducted via digital mode. For instance, India recently signed an MoU with the US to enhance cooperation in cybercrime investigations. Last year, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) developed MuleHunter AI, an AI and ML model, to help banks and financial institutions detect mule accounts used by fraudsters. The AI-enabled system is focussed on alerting users about real-time financial fraud. Meanwhile, the Centre is also taking steps to make the country a leader in the AI space. For this, it has launched the IndiaAI Mission with an outlay of INR 10,372 Cr, spread over the next five years. Under this, the central government aims to create an AI ecosystem with supercomputing capabilities comprising over 10,000 GPUs to various stakeholders. In January, 10 companies, including Jio Platforms and Tata Communications, were selected for the final bidding process to procure these GPUs.

Operant AI Announces India Launch to Protect Critical AI Systems in Real-Time

As AI adoption increases, ensuring the security of AI systems has become more urgent than ever. Operant's 3D Runtime Defense Platform for Cloud and AI brings critical cybersecurity capabilities to the Indian market to protect modern Indian software innovation and AI from the most critical attacks in the Age of AI The company's co-founders Vrajesh Bhavsar and Dr. Priyanka Tembey are Indian engineers who spent over a decade in Silicon Valley before starting Operant AI Silicon Valley-based Operant AI, the world's only Runtime AI Application Defense Platform, is launching its presence in India, bringing a critical layer of security to India's rapidly developing AI sector and the industries that engage with it, in order to fuel faster and safer AI innovation. Operant's unique cybersecurity technology offers complete 3D Runtime Defense for Cloud and AI, actively detecting and blocking the most common and costly attacks facing modern AI systems, including prompt injection, rogue agents, data poisoning, and data exfiltration. As AI adoption surges across key industries in India -- including fintech, healthcare, and enterprise software -- the need for robust security measures has become a priority. A recent Deloitte study found that 92% of Indian executives identify cybersecurity threats, including hacking and AI-specific vulnerabilities, as a key concern, while 91% worry about privacy risks tied to sensitive data in AI systems. In the age of AI, traditional security tools, such as static code scanning and firewalls, are insufficient against AI-powered threats, where malicious prompts, data poisoning, and unauthorized API access can expose businesses to large-scale breaches. Therefore, new security approaches that block attacks in real time are required to protect both AI systems and the cloud environments that are connected to them, where critical data lives unprotected from rogue agents and malicious prompts. Operant's real-time attack detection and prevention capabilities address this gap, ensuring AI-driven enterprises remain secure without slowing down innovation. Commenting on the need for such a solution, Operant's CEO and co-founder, Vrajesh Bhavsar said, "Today, as AI adoption accelerates, ensuring critical security is more urgent than ever -- not just to protect businesses, but also to safeguard their customers and end users from cyber threats and data breaches. At Operant, we've built a solution that does more than detect threats -- it actively protects sensitive data such as citizenship IDs, bank account numbers, and API keys in real time. Our platform can identify and auto-redact private data before it ever leaves a company's environment, ensuring robust data privacy while allowing organizations to scale their AI initiatives confidently and securely." With AI-driven applications growing rapidly, privacy and security concerns have become key obstacles to deploying AI models at scale. Several of the world's largest payment processing platforms are working on AI-powered fraud detection, yet privacy concerns about how AI data cycles with third parties -- such as AI APIs and containerized models -- have slowed progress. Operant's unique in-line auto-redaction capabilities solve this problem by automatically redacting private data before it ever leaves a company's environment. This ensures that companies operating in privacy-conscious industries, such as BFSI and fintech, can leverage AI without compromising data security or regulatory compliance. "So much of today's AI is deployed on Kubernetes, and it's really important to have a security plan in place to protect these applications and the data they're using," said Sarah Novotny, an AI industry leader who served on the founding team of Kubernetes at Google and is currently on the board of the Coalition for Secure AI (CosAI). "Operant's in-line auto-redaction enables teams to develop AI faster with Kubernetes-native privacy controls that span all the way from infrastructure to AI APIs, ensuring security, platform, and development teams can work together seamlessly to build today's leading AI technologies." While most "runtime" cybersecurity solutions only provide noisy visibility into a firehose of unactionable signals, Operant's unique ability to prioritize, detect and block these modern attacks at runtime wherever they happen in the live application environment is pivotal to securing every cloud stack that has any connection to AI, whether that's AI APIs, containerized models, or 3rd party containers using AI for tasks like data analysis. Operant's India launch represents a homecoming of sorts for its founders after years of innovation at the forefront of the Silicon Valley tech world. Operant's founding team came together in 2021 in San Francisco, California, to solve the biggest problems facing modern software. The company raised its seed funding and launched out of stealth in April 2023, and announced their Series A funding round in September 2024, bringing the total raised to $13.5 million, led by Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Felicis and Washington DC based venture capital firm Sinewave. When they started their founder journey, the urgency of securing AI as a freshly critical and rapidly evolving attack surface wasn't new to co-founders Vrajesh Bhavsar, CEO, and Dr. Priyanka Tembey, CTO. Vrajesh and Priyanka had already worked together over a decade ago using Machine Learning and AI to bring new levels of security to the Android ecosystem, back when the rapid adoption of the Android operating system created new opportunities for attackers to infiltrate devices and steal critical data. Bhavsar and Tembey bring together a unique combination of knowledge and experience from hardware to software that began with their undergraduate degrees in Gujarat and Pune, respectively. After getting his degree in Computer Science from the University of Gujarat and his Masters in Computer Science from USC, Bhavsar started his career as a kernel engineer at Apple building core security functionality into the iPhone and later founding the ML/AI business unit at ARM. Tembey got her degree at the University of Pune, and then used her PhD in computer science from Georgia Tech (USA) as the chief architect on VMWare's hybrid cloud product. Ashley Roof, Operant's third co-founder, is a California native who got her degree at Stanford University and brought over a decade of GTM experience to the team, starting with building out some of Google's first sales and marketing teams in India, across Hyderabad and Gurgaon. Operant's India launch comes directly on the heels of the platform being featured as a representative vendor in Gartner's industry-defining Market Guide for AI Trust, Risk, and Security Management (AI TRiSM), released on February 18, 2025. Bhavsar, Tembey, and Roof are engaging with leaders and customers across core Indian industries this month in Bengaluru, Pune, and Ahmedabad as the company establishes its permanent Indian market presence. Availability Operant's entire 3D Runtime Defense Platform for Cloud and AI is available immediately. For more information, please visit www.operant.ai About Operant: Operant AI, the world's only Runtime AI Application Defense Platform, actively protects every layer of live cloud and AI applications from infra to APIs. Unlike most cybersecurity tooling that is limited to single-layer visibility and lacks the ability to actually block attacks, Operant's 3D Runtime Defense Platform discovers, detects, and defends >80% of the OWASP Top 10 most critical attacks across APIs, Cloud and LLMs. Within minutes of Operant's single-step deployment, security and AI engineering teams gain a completely new level of active protection for their AI and Cloud applications, workloads, models, APIs, and Agents, bringing frictionless real-time security to dev, sec, and ops so that companies can deploy products and AI faster without security holding them back.