Governance, risk and compliance (GRC) is not something that companies want to worry about, but not having proper systems in place can land them in trouble. Examples are far and wide. The recent one being Welspun’s non-compliance crisis with its customers over issues of low-quality raw materials or Wells Fargo’s fake bank account creation problem. Enter FixNix, co-founded by Shanmugavel Sankaran in 2012 to address the niche security market using software. “We help prevent CEOs and other CXOs from getting fired,” he jokes.

In India, segments such as banking, pharmaceutical and automobile are highly regulated and the compliance norms keep getting updated very often. Due to the complex structure of these organisations, businesses may pay millions of dollars in fine for non-compliance to these norms. “In a world where businesses are growing at a rapid pace, we are trying to ensure they remain compliant with internal and external regulations,” says Shanmugavel.

The idea to start FixNix came up when Shanmugavel was the Chief Information Security Officer at Martjack, an e-commerce solution provider, and wanted an affordable and easy-to-use GRC product.

Affordable security

“The other players in this segment are often known to offer solutions targeting Fortune 500ish companies. They are very expensive — priced over $250,000 — and take years to implement. This makes it impossible for smaller businesses, those doing under $20 million per year, to afford these solutions.” FixNix offers nearly all these services at a tenth of the price on a SaaS Model that is quick to implement, he says.

The company was bootstrapped for four years, with personal investments of up to ₹2 crore. Early this year, the company raised a funding round from Jay Vijayan, former CIO of Tesla Motors, as a part of its $1.5-million pre-Series A Round. FixNix has built a good client base that includes Cipla and Societe Generale. “We are working closely with Swiss bank UBS trying to develop a regulatory risk data lake. We recently got selected at Barclays’ Rise Hackathon where we built treasury analytics for the bank”, notes Shanmugavel. It had already bagged a contract for HR risk analytics from few banks.

The firm recently launched FixNix University, a non-profit initiative to help students from smaller towns and villages with career opportunities. The programme is inspired by the Zoho University model, says Shanmugavel.

The company’s new SaaS-based application, Freshgrc.com, which is a Cloud-based version of their GRC product (priced between $2,000-$5,000 an year) is slated to be launched in early November. The team is also prototyping a new chatbot for banks in India. The company is also planning a $15-million Series A funding round by early next year.

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