New tech on the block: HealthTech, FinTech, cybersecurity, SaaS, blockchain, AI, crypto, OTT

The Tech Panda takes a look at recent tech launches.

Digital credit: B2B2C loan origination platform

Internovo Ventures, a joint venture between the family office of financial services veteran Karan Desai and Novostack, a new-age technology company has launched Indirow, a state-of-the-art B2B2C loan origination platform.

Karan Desai, Co-Founder at Internovo Ventures, said, “With Indirow, we aim to disrupt the conventional digital borrowing and lending model and present a futuristic, transparent, responsive and efficient borrowing and loan origination platform which safeguards its customer interest as well as helps businesses monetise their client base. User-friendly on-boarding is at the core of a strong customer relationship and we have made it possible through our strategic technology stacks and network collaborations.”

Akshay Srivastava who is also a Co-founder and leads technology added, “Putting the customers first, we have introduced initiatives like customer-led scrubbing of consumer data on the credit bureau so that credit score remains unaffected and customers are able to borrow right. We are working towards making Indirow a robust, differentiated and trusted customer acquisition platform to businesses. Our initial goal is to disburse over Rs.100 crore through Indirow in FY24.”

The Why

Live on Google Playstore and soon-to-be available on Apple app store and in web version, Indirow aims to meet the growing demand for various retail loan products in India with its diverse product offerings. This unique platform also offers opportunities to businesses to become partners and monetise their client base and develop new revenue streams.

The company has entered into a strategic partnership with RULoans, an Indian lending services business.

Features

• Indirow provides curated financing solutions to customers by leveraging an integrated credit assessment system with a leading credit bureau agency. The system helps Indirow evaluate the customer credit profile and prescribe suitable solutions and financiers.
• Unlike broker-driven small-scale loan arrangement market places, the platform does not charge its customers for its services.
• Broad range of credit solutions such as personal loan, home loan, business loan, loan against property, gold loan.
• Caters to small to midsize businesses that are into providing non-lending related services to a large captive pool of customers. By becoming Indirow partners, these businesses can offer credit solutions to their captive clientele via dedicated links, API integration and co-branded arrangements through the platform.
• Strong tech-enabled back-end capable of efficiently managing customer acquisition, on-boarding and borrowing journey with minimal manual intervention. Thus, the customer acquisition-to-loan disbursement process on the platform doesn’t require operational interventions from partners.
• Using Indirow mobile app or web site, the partners can view real time dashboards to track the loan processing status of their customers.

HealthTech: An offering in the medical value travel space

MedRabbits, a Pune-based HealthTech company, launched an offering in the medical value travel space. MedRabbits was conceived in 2017 as a way to bring fast, affordable and high-quality healthcare to the Indian customer’s doorstep. In addition to home healthcare, their medical tourism portfolio will help patients access the care they need at hospitals across India and globally.

Amol R Deshmukh – Founder and CEO, MedRabbits, said, “We deeply understand the pain points and the demand-supply gap between patients and hospitals. The need of the hour is exceptional customer service, quality healthcare services and affordable rates. To bridge this gap, we have now introduced our Health and Medical value travel for patients’ easy access to healthcare facilities across India and the globe. With our strong technology offering and wide network of healthcare providers, doctors and hospitals worldwide, we have all the right ingredients to make our customers’ surgery experience smooth and reposeful.”

The Why

The company’s latest vertical aligns with the Government’s ambitious ‘Heal in India’ initiative, wherein patients from across the globe can access India’s advanced healthcare systems at affordable rates.

As a commitment to its various offerings in the medical tourism space, MedRabbits has announced the opening of a representative office in Bangladesh, a country which caters to over 56% of the country’s medical tourism patients.

Features

• Medical value travel services with end-to-end concierge, hospitalization and post surgery rehabilitation services to people traveling from overseas to India for medical treatment
• Services for domestic patients exploring surgery options in different cities
• Care now, pay later (CNPL) plan
• By partnering with premier hospitals and specialty clinics across India and overseas, the company will assist patients with counseling, end-to-end travel, visas, second opinions, translation services, accommodation, patient admission, documentation and rehabilitation services within the country and globally.

Cybersecurity: Advanced security solutions for IT & security teams to leverage generative AI while preserving safety IP & customer data

Zscaler, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZS), a cloud security firm announced a set of advanced security solutions designed for IT and security teams to leverage the full potential of generative AI while preserving the safety of enterprises’ intellectual property and their customers’ data.

“Generative AI presents a game-changing inflection point in technology, and the organizations that have large volumes of relevant, private enterprise data to seize its potential today will emerge as leaders tomorrow,” said Jay Chaudhry, CEO, chairman and founder of Zscaler. “Recognizing the significance of this technology years ago, we’ve implemented AI and ML capabilities to dramatically improve multiple services from data protection to digital experience monitoring. Today, Zscaler is taking a quantum leap forward by introducing a suite of security capabilities that allow our customers to safely harness the power of new generative AI tools to predict and stop breaches.”

The Why

Delivering impactful AI-powered outcomes requires large volumes of diverse, high-quality data and a sophisticated AI engine to precisely train AI models to produce meaningful and accurate results. Zscaler’s AI advantage is the result of 15 years of expertise and leadership in developing and operating the world’s largest cloud security platform that processes more than 300 billion daily transactions from users, IoT/OT devices, workloads, and business-to-business communications. The platform’s proxy-based architecture and cloud security data lake combined with Zscaler’s Large Language Models (LLM) for secure connectivity provides one of the most comprehensive views of an organization’s security posture while also delivering large volumes of valuable anonymized training data to continuously improve the AI models and intelligently predict breaches with precision at an unprecedented pace.

Features

Zscaler has recently developed the following Innovations, currently in preview, that will harness generative AI to deliver precision outcomes:

• Security AutopilotTM with breach prediction – A proactive approach to securing data by enabling AI engines to continuously learn from changing cloud-based policies and logs. By recommending policies and performing impact analysis, Security Autopilot simplifies security operations while helping improve security posture control and preventing future breaches. This is currently piloted by ThreatLabz, Zscaler’s advanced threat research and incident response team.
• Zscaler NavigatorTM – A simplified and unified natural language interface to enable customers to interact with Zscaler products and access relevant documentation details using a seamless, secure, and user-friendly approach.
• Multi-Modal DLP – Traditional DLP solutions are limited to understanding and managing text and image-based data and the world has transitioned to a broader set of visual and audio multimedia formats. Zscaler will revolutionize the way DLP will operate by integrating generative AI and multi-modal capabilities into its DLP offerings to protect customers’ data from leakage across various media formats beyond text and images, such as video and audio formats.

Cybersecurity: A Cyber Risk Quantification (CRQ) tool to translate cyber risk into dollar values to communicate to non-tech executives

TAC announced the addition of Cyber Risk Quantification (CRQ) Tool to its ESOF Platform (Enterprise Security in One Framework), which translates cyber risk and vulnerabilities into dollar values that are easy to communicate to non-technical executives.

“Most security leaders have lots of technical data on cyber risk. But how many can answer the question, ‘How much will it cost us if we have a breach?’ If you can’t answer this question, you’re not alone. This is the next step in the evolution of Risk-Based Vulnerability Management. Solutions like ESOF VMP have helped by introducing automated prioritization tools and cyber risk scoring. But without CRQ, the technical risk picture doesn’t help the business quickly grasp the potential impacts in their terms,” said Trishneet Arora, Founder & CEO of TAC Security.

“The cyber insurance industry is booming, with more and more companies looking to protect themselves against potential financial losses from cyber-attacks. However, underwriters often have limited matrices to assess the risk, relying on questionnaires and other traditional methods. With the launch of ESOF CRQ, TAC Security is offering a more effective way to quantify cyber risk in financial terms, empowering executives to make more informed decisions about cyber insurance coverage and reduce financial risk.” said Chris Fisher, CMO, TAC Security.

The Why

With ESOF CRQ, TAC Security is redefining cyber risk quantification and setting a new standard for Risk-Based Vulnerability Management as it’s one of the few Vulnerability Management Platforms which has CRQ feature built-in.

Features

The ESOF CRQ feature uses a standard industry calculation to quantify cyber risk and provide a financial view of risk for the entire organization. The calculation is based on the likelihood of a breach happening and the estimated impact of that breach. This calculation is applied across the organization’s assets to create a top-level financial metric for discussions with senior management.

Cybersecurity: A platform to help organizations keep goods & services flowing by uniting performance, security, & availability under one common data framework

NETSCOUT SYSTEMS, INC. (NASDAQ: NTCT), a provider of performance management, cybersecurity, and DDoS protection solutions, introduced its Visibility Without Borders® (VWB) platform to help essential organizations keep goods and services flowing by uniting performance, security, and availability under one common data framework. By proactively identifying areas of complexity, fragility, and risk, the platform unlocks insights at unparalleled scale to deliver the intelligence needed to increase visibility, improve agility, and keep data and applications secure.

“Nearly all enterprises are on a digital transformation journey to drive greater optional efficiency, leverage data to develop new services, and provide differentiated customer experiences,” said Bob Laliberte, principal analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “However, as more organizations embrace distributed infrastructures, they add complexity, lose control, yet expand their cyber-attack surfaces, opening the door to costly downtime and unaffordable data breaches. Organizations struggle with the lack of fast, reliable detection and remediation that choke performance, compromise security, and eat away at the availability of key applications, data, services, and systems.”

The Why

Smart data, real-time metadata derived from network traffic and packet data, is the ultimate, consistent data source across any IT infrastructure. It serves as the basis for NETSCOUT’s patented ASI technology and is at the core of the platform.

Features

It addresses critical needs such as:

Network and Applications Performance Management: nGenius Enterprise Performance Management monitors, troubleshoots, and maximizes the performance of mission-critical applications and services. The solution integrates with DevOps, ITOps, AIOps, and SecOps ecosystems through APIs and data export and import utilities.

Cybersecurity: Omnis Network Security’s advanced network detection and response uses actionable ML-based analytics and insights to defend essential organizations from increasingly sophisticated and damaging cyberattacks.

AIOps: Through its advanced data export capability, the VWB platform feeds unique, indispensable metadata to modern analytics stacks, facilitating predictive analytics, network optimization, anomaly detection, and automated incident management, among other key AIOps functions.

Availability: Arbor DDoS Protection protects digital infrastructures and critical services from increasingly frequent, sophisticated, and damaging DDoS attacks.

Service Assurance: nGenius for Carrier Service Assurance protects service quality and improve the customer experience across 4G/5G, mobile, IoT, Cloud, and edge.

SaaS: AI-powered tool empower colleges & universities in evaluating student performance & potential

PrepInsta, an Indian website for placement preparation and an EdTech brand launched a SaaS Assessment Tool, Optimus by PrepInsta Prime. This revolutionary AI-powered tool is designed to empower colleges and universities in evaluating student performance and potential through a comprehensive range of assessments, including multiple-choice questions (MCQs), hands-on programming, coding exercises, hackathons, and more.

Optimus is now live and offered as a complimentary product to all partnered colleges and universities who have subscribed to PrepInsta’s flagship product PrepInsta Prime which is a one-stop solution for placement and upskilling offering 200+ courses to its users. This exclusive offering grants unrestricted access to the tool’s complete range of features and benefits at no extra charge. Notable institutions already benefiting from this cutting-edge dashboard tool include KRGI, SNS, SSIET, Rajlakshmi, KL, Gitam, and more. The tool aims to revolutionize the way educational institutions track student performance and curate personalized learning models to enhance overall academic outcomes.

Manish Agarwal, Co-founder & CMO at PrepInsta stated, “As we unveil Optimus by PrepInsta Prime, we embark on a transformative journey to redefine student assessment in educational institutions. This groundbreaking SaaS Assessment Tool empowers colleges and universities to unlock the full potential of their students through personalized learning experiences. With Optimus as a complimentary addition to our PrepInsta Prime subscription, we are revolutionizing the evaluation process and paving the way for enhanced academic outcomes.”

Features

• Includes a student performance report feature that generates comprehensive reports to assess individual strengths and areas for improvement
• Enables remote assessments, ensuring a seamless evaluation process regardless of location.
• Comparative performance analysis allows benchmarking and comparison of students’ performance against predefined standards.
• Objective rubric-based evaluation ensures fairness and consistency in assessing student performance.
• Competency mapping and skill gap analysis identify skill gaps in students, enabling targeted interventions and personalized learning plans.
• Ensures secure and proctored evaluations to maintain integrity.
• Real-time progress monitoring through a user-friendly dashboard empowers faculty members to tailor learning plans based on student performance.

Cybersecurity: 4 new cybersecurity services & capabilities to extend the power of its cloud security platform

Zscaler, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZS), a cloud security firm, debuted four new cybersecurity services and capabilities which further extend the power of its Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange™ cloud security platform. The innovations not only enhance the monitoring and remediation of sophisticated attacks but also deliver a fundamentally new approach to securely connecting branch offices – all while simplifying and streamlining the management process at scale for IT professionals.

“Enterprises relying on site-to-site VPNs for their branch locations are experiencing increased volumes of security threats,” said Naresh Kumar, VP, Product Management, Zscaler. “Site-to-site VPNs create an entry point for lateral threat movement and lack the security benefits of a zero trust architecture. Zscaler has reimagined branch connectivity by eliminating VPNs and providing secure access via the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange for users, servers, and devices at branch sites – all you need is a broadband connection.”

The Why

Large-scale cybersecurity attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and widespread. These attacks can have a devastating impact on an organization’s reputation, financial stability, and day-to-day operations. To combat these threats, it’s essential for businesses to have a comprehensive cloud security platform that can provide real-time threat detection, automated response, and proactive risk mitigation. Processing over 300 billion transactions per day, the Zscaler platform is a fully integrated, extensible cloud security platform that provides customers with always-on intelligence that allows organizations to take a proactive approach to security, respond to threats efficiently, and optimize their security posture.

Features

Zscaler Risk360 – A powerful risk quantification and visualization framework

Zscaler Risk360 helps CIOs and CISOs make informed and expedited business decisions that help reduce cyber risk. By leveraging a rich set of signals from internal and external sources within the Zscaler platform, IT and security leaders gain unparalleled visibility and actionable intelligence from more than 100 data-driven factors to enable the following:

• Powerful Risk Quantification – Delivers real-timerisk scores for all stages of cyber breaches, as well as risk visualized across four entities, including workforce, third parties, applications, and assets. 
• Intuitive Visualization and Reporting – Filters top drivers for cyber risk and anticipates financial exposure estimates, including financial remediation recommendations, with the ability to create concise board-level presentation materials.
• Actionable Remediation – Prioritizes actionable recommendations with guided workflows to investigate and remediate the most critical issues to keep an organization secure and operations running non-stop.

Zero Trust Branch Connectivity – Redefining branch connectivity for superior security and simplified management

Zero Trust Branch Connectivity delivers simplicity, scale, and superior security, dramatically reducing recurring overhead costs associated with MPLS connections for branch locations. This fundamentally new approach to securely connecting branch offices helps eliminate risky site-to-site VPNs over SD-WANs resulting in improved user, application, and data security, lowered costs, and reduced operational complexity, all while being able to significantly accelerate M&A. 

A new plug-and-play appliance features zero touch provisioning, making installs effortless. Zero Trust Branch Connectivity enables enterprises to:

• Replace Site-to-Site VPNs and Costly MPLS Connections with Zero Trust – Securely connecting users, services, and IoT/OT devices between branches and their application stack.
• Simplify Branch IT Operations – Providing direct-to-internet connectivity to reach cloud-based applications eliminates the need to maintain complex legacy routing and reduces infrastructure.
• Significantly accelerate M&A and B2B – Reducing time to productivity for organizations that are bringing people and business applications together.

Zscaler ITDR Solution  Mitigating identity attacks with continuous visibility, risk monitoring, and threat detection

Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting users for their identities and credentials. The Zscaler ThreatLabz annual Phishing Report found that most modern phishing attacks rely on stolen credentials. Zscaler ITDR strengthens the business’s security posture with continuous visibility into identity misconfigurations and risky permissions. With Zscaler ITDR, CISOs can: 

• Quantify Identity Risk – Track the posture of the identity attack surface with quantified risks.
• Find Misconfigurations – Discover risky configurations like GPP password exposure, unconstrained delegation, and stale passwords that open up new attack paths.
• Real-Time Monitoring – Get alerted to new risks and issues when configurations change.
• Stop Privilege Escalation – Detect and stop attacks like DCSync, DCShadow, kerberoasting, and more in the event of a compromise.
• Remediate Issues – Understand the issue, impact, and user affected. Leverage step-by-step remediation guidance along with video tutorials, scripts, and commands.

ZSLogin Feature – Centralized login dashboard with streamlined authentication for IT processes 

Zscaler makes IT Administrators’ lives easier while elevating their effectiveness by providing the following: 

• Centralized Entitlement Management – Simple way to review all entitlements across the platform and ensure administrators receive the appropriate permissions. 
• Passwordless Multi-Factor Authentication – Support for passwordless, multi-factor authentication, increasing the strength of admin authentication that is easier to use and phishing resistant.
• Automated Administrator Identity Management – Administrator identities can be managed using SCIM to automate the creation, entitlement assignment, and revocation of privileges based on the identity data from customer identity providers.

Blockchain: An incentivized public network that addresses the pain-points of blockchain industry

MOI Technology, a context aware P2P Protocol ecosystem launched their Testnet, Babylon, an incentivized public network that addresses the pain-points of blockchain industry by improving efficiency, scalability, flexibility, and security.

“We are delighted to unveil the eagerly awaited Babylon Testnet, dedicated to unlocking the full potential of the web3 landscape. Our primary goal with this launch is to bring simplicity and human-centricity to digital networks and personalize the internet. Through MOI, we are ushering the transformative era of Contextual Compute and Interaction State Machines that will reshape how businesses and individuals operate in the emerging digital interacting society. As the tech industry embraces blockchain and its vast range of applications, MOI is poised for even more remarkable advancements.” Anantha Krishnan, Founder, MOI expressed his enthusiasm about the launch.

The Why

Unlike, today’s blockchain’s primary focus only on applications, MOI through its emphasis on participant centricity, delivers human-like interactions in a digitally interacting world.

AI: Solutions for retail e-commerce

Technology solutions provider, Qodequay unveiled their AI enablement solutions, empowering retail e-commerce businesses to make faster, data-driven decisions for sustained success.

Founder Shashikant Kalsha and Hemlata Kalsha says, “At Qodequay, we bring a unique blend of design thinking and extensive expertise in AI and machine learning to the retail sector. Our AI enablement solutions have the potential to revolutionise how retail e-commerce businesses operate, enabling them to unlock the power of data and drive growth in an increasingly competitive landscape.”

The Why

As the e-commerce sector continues to gain momentum, companies are realising the pivotal role of data in their operations. According to a recent survey, 83% of retail experts believe that data-driven decision making is the key to thriving in the retail e-commerce space.

In response to this industry demand, Qodequay’s AI enablement solutions provide a transformative range of capabilities to retail e-commerce companies, enabling them to gather important customer data, gain user insights, and enhance engagement through personalised customer experiences.

Features

• With advanced data collection techniques, businesses can gather valuable customer data that fuels AI algorithms, allowing for more accurate decision making.
• AI-powered recommendation engines guide customers to relevant products, improving conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
• E-commerce companies can optimise their supply chain, leading to improved inventory management, reduced costs, and enhanced operational efficiency.

Chatbot: An AI Chat bot designed to provide comprehensive cryptocurrency education

Mudrex, a Bengaluru and San Francisco-based Y Combinator-backed global crypto investing platform, launched SatoshiGPT, a pioneering AI Chat bot designed to provide comprehensive cryptocurrency education. This first of its kind innovative and free learning tool aims to educate individuals about the crypto ecosystem, enabling them to make informed decisions in their crypto investments.

“We believe that education is the key to empowering individuals to make informed decisions in the crypto ecosystem,” said Edul Patel, CEO and Co-founder at Mudrex. “With the launch of SatoshiGPT, we are excited to offer a free and accessible learning tool that will expand knowledge, demystify crypto concepts, and ultimately foster confidence among users.”

Shashank Sahu, Head of New Initiatives at Mudrex, emphasized the transformative impact of AI on product engagement, stating, “AI is reshaping the way we engage with products. Our objective is to leverage AI in simplifying information accessibility, safeguarding users from scams, and empowering them to make smart investment decisions. To accomplish this mission, we are proactively exploring inventive concepts to support users in their cryptocurrency investment endeavours.”

The Why

Cryptocurrency has emerged as a popular investment avenue, attracting both seasoned investors and newcomers seeking to capitalize on its potential. However, many individuals face barriers in understanding this complex and ever-evolving field. Factors such as the fear of missing out (FOMO), a knowledge gap regarding the technology and different tokens, and the prevalence of scams contribute to scepticism and hesitation.

Recognizing these challenges, Mudrex has developed SatoshiGPT, an inclusive platform designed to bridge the gap in crypto knowledge.

Features

• At present, the platform is accessible in English and Hindi, with plans to expand to include additional regional languages in the near future.
• Using the power of the AI-driven GPT engine, SatoshiGPT simplifies complex topics, making them easily understandable for users at all levels of expertise.
• The platform curates content from reputable sources, regularly updating it with the latest research and information to ensure users have access to the most current insights.
• It’s planning to launch an AI portfolio analyzer. This tool evaluates users’ crypto portfolios and provides personalized recommendations to optimize their investment strategies. By identifying potential weaknesses or areas for improvement, users can make informed decisions to enhance their portfolio’s performance and mitigate risks effectively.

OTT: TV & mobile app offers linear television, wireline broadband & other services at competitive price points

NXTDIGITAL, the digital media division of technology-led customer experience company Hinduja Global Solutions Ltd. (HGS), have rolled out their Over The Top (OTT) service strategy with the launch of NXTPLAY, their TV and Mobile application. This will be an extension of the successful ‘ONEDigital’ combo service, where the digital distribution major offers linear television, wireline broadband and other services at competitive price points.

NK Rouse, COO at NXTDIGITAL said, “For us, this is a continuation of one of our business principles centred around “Partnership for Growth”. We have always strived to provide our Digital Service Partners with innovative solutions for their customers. After digital TV via cable and HITS, broadband and other services like public WIFI and CCTV; adding OTT to our services portfolio was a natural progression – considering the surge in popularity of on-demand platforms in India. We’re sure our partners will be excited to engage with a wider universe of customers and build a new revenue stream through this.”

Mukund Sharma, Advisor to NXTDIGITAL, said, “NXTPLAY is designed as a one-stop content discovery and data platform. The smart recommendation engines for varied content, ease of payment and affordable prices are the three pillars of the service, ensuring consumer delight and long-term customer engagement and retention. Our partners OTTPlay, SABOT, and PLAYFLIX bring 25+ immensely popular OTT platforms with diversified linear and non-linear streams of multi-genre, niche and special interest content.”

The Why

The app, which customers can download from the Google Playstore, is available for television and mobile phones and aims to fill content gaps accessible only through OTT channels.

Features

• Over 300,000 hours of local and global OTT content in the customer’s favourite genres and local languages
• Enables a consumer to discover what content to watch, where to find it, and assess reviews.
• Consumers can add movies to their view lists and give ratings to the shows.