Zluri | Identity Governance | Bengaluru
He talked to 215 security leaders before writing a single line of architecture. Then he built the platform they described.
Zluri's funding arc is clean and fast. A $2M seed in early 2021 from Endiya Partners and Kalaari Capital. A $10M Series A in 2022 from MassMutual Ventures. A $20M Series B in July 2023 led by Lightspeed Venture Partners - the global firm behind Slack, Snap, and dozens of infrastructure bets. Total: $32M raised. Zero wasted rounds.
What convinced Lightspeed was the architecture argument. Enterprise SaaS was exploding - organizations deploying 300 to 1,000 applications, most of them only partially visible to IT. The legacy IGA vendors were built for a different era: on-premise, slow-moving, document-heavy. Zluri's cloud-native platform, built on a unified data fabric, was architected for the world that already existed.
Chaithanya's engineering decisions drove that distinction. The patented discovery engine wasn't a feature; it was a philosophical commitment. A tool that could find what you didn't know you had - shadow apps, dormant accounts, unreviewed access rights - would be worth building even before the governance layer existed. That sequencing showed up in how Lightspeed's team described their investment: they saw Zluri competing against "older vendors with older architectures, some more than a decade old from the Asset Management world."
BITS Pilani is not a typical starting point for a cybersecurity CTO. It's an engineering institution where students often graduate into deep technical domains - aerospace, chemicals, mechanical systems. Chaithanya studied chemical engineering there, earning both a BE and an MS in an integrated program from 2006 to 2011. The discipline is about understanding systems: how substances interact, how processes flow, how you control what you can't always see.
The translation to software engineering is more intuitive than it sounds. Complex systems, invisible interactions, the constant need to detect what's happening before you can regulate it. Chaithanya didn't abandon his training when he pivoted to software - he repurposed it. The identity governance stack he builds at Zluri is, in a meaningful way, a process control system for enterprise access: track every flow, detect every anomaly, automate every adjustment.
Before founding Zluri, his career at KNOLSKAPE was its own education. The gamification company specialized in immersive simulations for corporate learning - not software infrastructure, not enterprise security. But building a platform that scaled to global customers required the same engineering discipline: performance, reliability, distributed systems, and the organizational muscle of leading engineering teams through rapid growth. Chaithanya went from developer to Director of Engineering without changing companies. That's a signal.
The founding moment at Zluri had a particular texture. Sethu had discovered he was paying for 14 subscriptions he'd forgotten about. He mapped that personal chaos to what he knew about mid-market enterprise IT - companies paying for tools across hundreds of applications, most of them unaudited, many of them unused, some of them accessed by people who'd left the company months ago. When he called Ritish and Chaithanya, the conversation didn't require much convincing.
All three of them had spent years inside a company that ran on SaaS tools. All three of them had watched the stack grow. All three of them had, at some point, tried to answer the question "how many tools are we actually using?" and come up short. The market was enormous - $300B in annual cloud and SaaS spend - and the tooling for managing it was either non-existent or built on decade-old assumptions about enterprise software.
Chaithanya's contribution to the founding conversation was the engineering architecture. What does a platform look like that can discover applications without requiring IT teams to manually inventory them? How do you build integrations across 200,000+ apps? How do you design governance workflows that compliance teams will actually use? The product roadmap that emerged from those early conversations became Zluri's foundation.
"A world where every identity and its interactions with applications are visible, secure, and intelligently governed."- Zluri's founding vision, architected under Chaithanya Yambari's technical leadership
The 60% of enterprise applications that remain invisible to IT departments are not a configuration problem. They're a visibility problem. Chaithanya Yambari built Zluri on the premise that governance can only follow discovery - and that the companies still relying on ticket-based access management and quarterly spreadsheet audits are running the wrong playbook entirely.
Chaithanya shares insights on identity governance, SaaS security, and engineering leadership.