Pavan Thatha, co-founder and CEO of ShieldSquare, is all set to join Israeli entrepreneurs and meet techies, scientists and investors from across the globe. He has been chosen from India to participate in the ‘Start Tel Aviv’ event in September
Awards and recognitions are nothing new for Pavan Thatha, but something like this was much-awaited. Pavan’s startup, ShieldSquare based in Bengaluru, was among the six shortlisted startups from India in the competition Start Tel Aviv. ShieldSquare was declared as the winner of the second edition of the contest run by The Embassy of Israel in partnership with TiE Delhi-NCR. Pavan’s startup was chosen as the Indian entry for the September event in Israel.
Pavan will get an opportunity to join local Israeli entrepreneurs, participate in lectures, workshops and meetings with leading Israeli investors and professionals. Start Tel Aviv will take place during the DlD Festival week and participants from all over the globe will have the opportunity to meet the coolest and smartest companies, techies, startups, designers, artists, scientists, investors and cultural drivers from Israel and abroad.
Sharing details about his venture, Pavan says, “We help protect online businesses against web scraping and bot attacks, thus increasing revenues and improving site performance. We started ShieldSquare to address one of the major problems that most of the online business today are facing — web scraping. It is a computer software technique of extracting information from websites. Usually such software programmes simulate human exploration of the World Wide Web by either implementing low-level Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or embedding a fully-fledged web browser, such as Internet Explorer. We are building a revolutionary technology that stops unauthorised scraping by bots and creates a level playing field for online business to grow.”
For online business, be it classifieds, content portals, e-commerce, travel sites, content theft is becoming the major concern that is affecting the competitiveness of the business. The content harvested through site scraping tools is used to illicitly publish valuable information, gain competitor business intelligence and also undercut competitor’s prices.
ShieldSquare stops the unauthorised bots from scraping content of the portals, thereby increasing their revenues and reducing their infrastructure costs. “The USP of our product is the technology which uses a combination of dynamic bot challenge system (non intrusive to the user) and big data analytics through which we are able to identify the bots accurately,” he adds. ShieldSquare’s founding team consists of alumnus of IITs and experienced technologists. They got to know about the Start Tel Aviv contest through their advisor Chandu Nair, who is also a TiE Chennai charter member.
Talking about the tech startups in India, he says, “We have the right eco-system being developed over last the few years which will help the Indian technology startups to go global. There are a lot of accelerators like Microsoft Venture Accelerator mentoring the early stage startups to focus in right direction for growth. There is also good availability of risk capital at early stages for right technology ideas.”