At the 2023 RSA Conference in San Francisco, Varun Badhwar presented his latest company, Endor Labs, to the judges at the Innovation Sandbox, the conference’s startup competition. While AI security company HiddenLayer ultimately carried the day, the event still marked a singular honor for Badhwar. He has founded three companies, and all three have been named an Innovation Sandbox finalist: CipherCloud in 2011, RedLock in 2017, and Endor Labs in 2023.
None took the top honors, but imagine a director who films three movies and earns three Oscar nominations. This raises the question of how Badhwar approaches innovation and what he is doing differently than other founders.
Listen to Practitioners
While Badhwar demurred about having any special knowledge of innovation, he shared some insight into how he comes up with ideas. “The method is … very simple: You listen to people around you,” he says.
Badhwar started his first company, CipherCloud, in 2010, when enterprises first started really banking on cloud applications like Salesforce and Dropbox. He started thinking about what concerns and pain points people had about moving to the cloud, and the answer he came up with was the same we see today.
“The No. 1 concern would be loss of control on their data,” Badhwar says. “They’ve typically had it behind their four walls … now they’re giving it to somebody else?”
The solution CipherCloud came up with was anonymizing, encrypting, and tokenizing data before sending it to the cloud. That ameliorated some of the fear around companies’ sending their crown jewels out into the world, and that’s where the startup found its market.
A few years later, Badhwar left CipherCloud to lean into machine learning-based cloud security measures and founded RedLock to address the same concerns about lo ..
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