Indusface Achieves Unprecedented 100% Customer Rating with AI-Powered Application Security

What does it take to achieve something unprecedented in the enterprise software world? Wenesh Sundar, co-founder of Indusface, has the answer: building a product so exceptional that 100% of customers recommend it. In an industry where customer satisfaction often hovers around 70-80%, Indusface has shattered expectations with a perfect recommendation score across 250+ customer reviews on Gartner—an achievement unmatched not just in cybersecurity, but across all enterprise software categories.

This isn't just a statistical anomaly. It's the result of a deliberate journey from a consulting company to building world-class application security products that protect over 5,000 companies across 95 countries. Sundar's story reveals the blueprint for creating products that customers don't just use—they champion.

From a cricket-loving entrepreneur who partnered with a former Ranji Trophy player to building India's leading application security platform, this is a masterclass in customer obsession, product excellence, and the patience required to build something truly extraordinary.

The Unlikely Cricket Connection

Every great startup story has an unexpected beginning, but few involve a Ranji Trophy cricketer who once bowled to Sachin Tendulkar. Wenesh Sundar's journey to co-founding Indusface began with his passion for sports statistics and a chance business partnership that would change both their lives.

"I'm a mad cricket fan," Sundar admits. "I used to maintain stats of Tendulkar, Roger Federer, and Nadal's early days. I was a stats junkie when it comes to sports." This hobby took on new meaning when he met Ashish Tandon, his future co-founder, during a business deal for a North American company in India.

When Cricket Meets Cybersecurity

Tandon wasn't just another business partner—he was a fast bowler who had played six to seven matches in the Ranji Trophy. "If you search on cricinfo.com for Ashish Tandon, there's a profile of him as a fast bowler," Sundar reveals. "The first debut ball he bowled was to Sachin Tendulkar, and Zaheer Khan was his replacement."

For a cricket fanatic like Sundar, this connection was magnetic. "It was good to actually have a person who has rubbed shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the people I aspired to just watch on TV." The deal was sealed when Tandon promised to arrange a meeting with Sachin Tendulkar—a promise that cemented their partnership.

"I had the product expertise, he had the regional expertise and sales expertise. We joined hands and built the product," Sundar explains. This unique combination of technical depth and market understanding would prove crucial for Indusface's future success.

Building from the Foundations: India's Cybersecurity Evolution

Indusface's story mirrors India's broader transformation in the global technology landscape. When Sundar returned from North America in 2007-2008, driven by what he calls "patriotism," India was primarily known for IT services, not product innovation.

The Three Waves of Indian Tech

Sundar identifies three distinct waves in India's technology evolution:

Wave 1: Low-Cost Outsourcing (1990s-2000s) - India became the global destination for software services through companies like Infosys, TCS, and Wipro.

Wave 2: Product Development Centers (2000s-2010s) - Global giants like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook established development centers in India for critical product work.

Wave 3: Indigenous Innovation (2010s-Present) - Indian companies began building and scaling software products globally, with Indusface among the early pioneers in this wave.

"Way back in 2008-2009, how many products were being built and innovated from India? You could literally count them in your hands," Sundar reflects. "We had Zoho and Freshworks, but these multi-billion dollar companies didn't exist then."

Overcoming the Perception Challenge

Building a cybersecurity product from India in 2008 meant confronting skepticism from global customers. "It's not just cybersecurity—software products in general being built, innovated, and globally scaled from India was non-existent or very limited," Sundar explains.

The solution wasn't defensive marketing—it was exceptional execution. "Sometimes when you start and get fixated with solving a problem, you don't worry about Israel and how people perceive you. You have that fire and hunger to build a world-class product."

His philosophy became foundational for Indusface: "How people perceive is purely a function of how you perceive yourself and how confident you are in solving the problem. If you do that well enough, the perception problem—no matter whether you are from India, Timbuktu, Peru, or Brazil—will take care of itself."

The Product Evolution: From Risk Assessment to Comprehensive Security

Indusface's journey to product excellence wasn't linear. It began as a consulting company in 2004, evolved through multiple product iterations, and achieved its current form through lessons learned from both success and failure.

Version 1: The Learning Experience

The company's first product focused solely on risk assessment—identifying vulnerabilities in applications. "Great product, delightful customers, but we were not able to make tons and tons of money," Sundar admits. Despite significant upfront investment, the business model wasn't sustainable.

The breakthrough came when Trend Micro acquired the product in 2012-2013. "That was a huge testimony and milestone in terms of giving us confidence that yes, being in India, we can take a concept, ideate, translate it into a product, build a world-class product, and have it acquired by a world-class company."

The Cash Cushion and Strategic Pivot

The acquisition provided two crucial elements: validation and capital. "It also gave us a lot of cushion of cash which allowed us to survive and put it back into something way much bigger and better."

More importantly, it provided learning. "We found out that just risk assessment was not enough. We also needed to up the game and do risk protection and risk management on a continuous basis."

This insight led to the development of AppTrana, launched in 2017, which became Indusface's flagship product and the foundation of their current success.

AppTrana: The Five-Pillar Security Platform

The current AppTrana platform addresses the comprehensive security needs of modern applications through five integrated components:

1. Discovery: Asset Inventory Management

"Having an inventory of your public-facing assets might seem obvious, but with agile development and large teams, it's a big problem because there are many moving parts," Sundar explains. The discovery service automatically identifies all public-facing websites, APIs, and applications.

2. Risk Assessment: Continuous Vulnerability Analysis

The platform conducts automated, frequent, and deep risk assessments of all public-facing applications. "We do risk assessment on a continuous basis," ensuring that security posture remains current as applications evolve.

3. Risk Protection: Instant Mitigation

"More than 80% of the risks that we identify get mitigated instantly in real-time," Sundar reveals. For the remaining risks that can't be automatically fixed, Indusface maintains an SLA to resolve them within three days through their SwiftComply feature.

4. Risk Management: 24/7 Monitoring

The platform provides continuous monitoring with subject matter experts managing security insights, reports, and actionable intelligence for customers.

5. Acceleration: Performance Enhancement

Partnering with third-party CDN and edge computing platforms, AppTrana not only secures applications but also enhances their performance for end users.

The Integrated Advantage

"Nobody is doing all five under one umbrella," Sundar emphasizes. "That's our claim to glory and what has evolved to become our current minimum viable product that gives us the right to win."

This comprehensive approach, delivered as a fully managed service with disruptive value-based pricing, creates what Sundar calls an "unfair advantage" in the marketplace.

The Unprecedented Achievement: 100% Customer Recommendation

The number that sets Indusface apart isn't their 5,000+ customers or 95+ country presence—it's the perfect 100% customer recommendation rating across 250+ reviews on Gartner.

Breaking Down the Achievement

"We are the only vendor who has not just the highest product rating and highest support rating, but actually across categories—not just in the application security category—we have 100% customer recommendation," Sundar states with justified pride.

The statistic is remarkable for its scope: "At the end of the survey, there's a question that asks on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend them? All 250 of them said they will recommend us."

The Philosophy Behind the Numbers

This achievement stems from what Sundar calls a "culture of customer obsession." When Indusface was bootstrapped, he would tell people: "We have about 100 investors when we had 100 customers. The customers paying us is our investment. They are investing their time and money in us, and we have to deliver results in terms of a delightful product."

Learning from Pain Points

Paradoxically, some of Indusface's strongest customer advocacy has emerged from their biggest challenges. "Some of our greatest customer advocacy has come from the biggest pain and issues the customer had with us," Sundar reveals.

"Every product has issues. Every business cycle will go through something where you screw up. But how you deal with those situations authentically, honestly, transparently, and visibly show that you're acting on it to improve and make it better for the customer is how you build trust."

The Three Pillars of Customer Success

Sundar's formula for customer delight centers on three critical elements:

1. Adoption: Customers actually use the product effectively

2. Payment: Customers willingly pay for the value received

3. Advocacy: Customers become enthusiastic referrals and provide positive reviews

"That's the only formula for success," he emphasizes. "Being fixated to do this at every stage of your product is what creates results like what we have."

AI: The Double-Edged Sword in Cybersecurity

As artificial intelligence reshapes the cybersecurity landscape, Sundar provides a nuanced perspective on its role as both enabler and disruptor.

AI as Foundation, Not Differentiation

"Right now, AI is no longer a differentiation. It's foundational," Sundar observes. "No longer can you say 'I use AI' as a competitive advantage. AI broadly, everybody has to use."

The real differentiation comes from data, context, and reinforcement learning specific to the problems being solved. "The differentiation is going to come based on the data, the context, the reinforcement learning that you're building specific to the problem that you're solving for the customer."

Two Perspectives: AI for Security and Security for AI

Sundar breaks down the AI impact into two categories:

AI for Security: Using artificial intelligence to enhance security capabilities through threat hunting, zero-day vulnerability research, and providing expert-level insights to customers through automated agents and use cases.

Security for AI: Protecting AI-driven applications themselves. "With prompting and AI-powered app development, somebody is creating applications without even understanding how they're stitched together. Security for those AI-driven apps and the new threat vectors is a huge opportunity."

The Data Advantage

Indusface's competitive moat comes from their massive data processing capability: "We stop a few billion attacks every month and process trillion-plus attack traffic monthly."

This data provides context across:

• Good data vs. bad attack data vs. probe data
• Vertical-specific patterns
• Geographic and regional trends
• Attack source origins
• Cross-customer aggregated learning

"All this data, not just specific to customers but across customers aggregated to be a learning engine, can be translated into specific use case insights to customers," Sundar explains.

The Underserved Market: SMB Cybersecurity

One of the most pressing challenges Sundar identifies is the cybersecurity gap in small and medium businesses—a market largely underserved due to affordability constraints rather than lack of need.

The Three "Oh Moments"

Sundar describes the typical SMB cybersecurity journey through three critical realizations:

First "Oh Moment": A customer asks about their vulnerability management program, or compliance requirements suddenly appear. "If I solve this problem, it enables my sale. If I don't solve this problem, it's going to be a barrier for my sales."

Second "Oh Moment": After implementing a quick, cheap solution, they realize applications keep changing. "They hit the second 'oh moment' and realize they need somebody to solve this on a continuous basis—a managed service provider."

Third "Oh Moment": They get a quote from established players that "makes small companies drop their jaws saying 'I cannot afford that.'" This is when they realize they need fully managed 24/7 security for survival, but affordability only comes after reaching a certain company size.

The Market Opportunity

This affordability gap creates a massive opportunity. McKinsey reports that the SMB cybersecurity market in the US alone represents a multi-trillion dollar opportunity, with application security comprising a $200 billion segment.

"The smaller the company, the more stretched they are on time, and the higher the premium they're able to pay for a managed service," Sundar notes. "Whereas larger companies have their own internal security SOC teams and look at managed services more as labor arbitrage."

Key Takeaways

Wenesh Sundar's journey with Indusface offers several crucial insights for entrepreneurs building enterprise products:

Customer Obsession Over Everything: The path to 100% customer recommendation lies in treating customers as investors, responding authentically to problems, and maintaining focus on adoption, payment, and advocacy.

Product Evolution Through Learning: Building exceptional products requires patience to iterate through multiple versions, learning from failures, and having the courage to completely reimagine the solution when necessary.

Comprehensive Solutions Win: In complex enterprise markets, solving part of the problem often isn't enough. Indusface's success comes from addressing all five components of application security under one umbrella.

Data as Competitive Moat: In the AI era, sustainable advantages come from unique data sets, context-specific learning, and reinforcement loops that become more valuable over time.

Global Credibility from India: Perception challenges can be overcome through exceptional execution and confidence in solving real problems, regardless of geographic origin.

Market Timing and Positioning: Identifying underserved segments (like SMB cybersecurity) and building affordable solutions can create significant opportunities in large, established markets.

Sundar's story demonstrates that building an exceptional enterprise product requires more than technical excellence—it demands deep customer empathy, patience for iteration, and the conviction to solve problems completely rather than partially.

As cybersecurity becomes increasingly critical for businesses of all sizes, Indusface's achievement of perfect customer satisfaction while serving thousands of global companies provides a blueprint for creating products that customers don't just use, but enthusiastically champion.

"The culture of customer obsession that you build, being authentic in terms of the way you respond to feedback, screw-ups, good things, bad things—do it consistently, and results like what we have will happen," Sundar concludes.

In an industry where good enough often suffices, Indusface has proven that pursuing perfection in customer experience can yield unprecedented results—even a perfect 100% recommendation rating that stands alone across all enterprise software categories.

About the Guest

Wenesh Sundar is the co-founder of Indusface, a leading application security company that protects over 5,000 companies across 95 countries. With extensive experience in North America before returning to India in 2007-2008, Sundar brings a unique global perspective to building world-class cybersecurity products from India.

Under his leadership, Indusface has achieved the unprecedented distinction of 100% customer recommendation rating across 250+ reviews on Gartner—a feat unmatched across all enterprise software categories. The company's flagship AppTrana platform provides comprehensive application security through a five-component approach covering discovery, assessment, protection, management, and acceleration.

Indusface was founded in 2004 and has evolved from a consulting company to a leading AI-powered application security platform. The company's solutions protect web applications, mobile apps, and APIs for businesses ranging from startups to large enterprises, with particular strength in financial services, healthcare, and SaaS companies requiring high compliance standards.