Mr. Rammohan Varadarajan
B. Tech., 1982, Chemical Engineering

Mr. Rammohan Varadarajan is the Co-founder and CEO at Acalvio Technologies. He obtained his B.Tech. degree in Chemical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1982 and Master of Science in Chemical Engineering and Computer Science from Louisiana State University in 1984 and 1986 respectively.

Mr. Varadarajan started his career as a researcher on projects funded by US government on security and distributed systems at Odyssey Research in Ithaca, NY. Then he moved to the Silicon Valley and joined Informix to combine security and databases – building best-in-class database systems, which were military grade secure. This led to founding of his  first startup Arcot.

Arcot made significant contributions in 2-factor authentication and eCommerce security. Arcot Systems, under his leadership, has won numerous awards including the Morgan Stanley Innovation Award. Later, Arcot was acquired by CA Technologies (now Broadcom). At CA Technologies, Mr. Varadarajan led several new initiatives in mobile security and data science. After he left CA, he funded and started couple of companies in social media. Subsequently, Mr. Varadarajan, retuned to security and founded his new company called Acalvio Technologies which is focused on protecting enterprises from bad actors (hackers) – nation states and hobbyists. This is enabled by award-winning deception technology to detect and respond to malicious activity – with precision and speed. Acalvio Technologies was an RSA Innovation SandBox Finalist Award winner in 2018.

Mr. Varadarajan has spent his professional life in high tech, a large part in building Cyber Security solutions that help businesses and consumers defeat malicious and fraudulent activity.

At Arcot Systems, Mr. Varadarajan and his team have made eCommerce shopping safer for all mankind. The team co-invented the industry’s first large-scale Online Shopping Security [Federated Authentication Protocol in partnership with Visa and MasterCard; branded as. 3-D Secure, Verified by Visa, MasterCard Securecode, etc.], which became the universal Gold Standard for eCommerce security all the way from America to Zimbabwe… ~1 Billion users worldwide across 10,000+ banks and all card brands (MasterCard, Visa, AMEX, Discover, JCB, China Union Pay, etc.).

Sharing his professional experience, Mr. Varadarajan said, “It also gave me the great honor to win the support of luminaries like Nandan Nilekani, Shailesh Mehta, Dr Taher El Gamal (inventor of SSL), Dr Martin Helman (inventor of PKI) – relationships that I will cherish forever”.

 


Special Memories

I was neither adventurous nor confident/ outgoing enough to make an impact in campus activity. My best memories are banal – of spending time with my wing mates – playing cricket in the hallway – when we should have been in class. Of listening to my roommate playing Jethro Tull and pretending that he was Ian Anderson. Of my friends raiding my room after my weekend visits home, looking for goodies that my mom was sure to have packed. Waiting for studious friends to finish studying so that I could borrow their notes. Lounging 3 to a room solving the world’s problems. I also have fond memories of surprising my teachers with my ability to solve complex problems and ace exams in subjects that I liked”.