Powering up with passion

With over nine of experience, entrepreneur, Manan Shah has successfully paved his own path in the field of cyber security

Tell us about your inspiring journey from school dropout to cyber security entrepreneur

At the age of 15, I was busy fixing computers for my neighbours and relatives as a hobby. I was a hardware expert who hated going to school and doing regular classwork. Honestly, I never had a penchant for the formal education structure in school. I was a proud backbencher who was often reprimanded by the school teachers for consistently failing in all my subjects. However, the only subject that I aced in class was computer science.

I spent most of my childhood staying hooked to the PC watching online videos and learning about programming languages and hacking. Things took a beautiful turn when I attended a seminar on ethical hacking at the MS University Vadodara back in the year 2009. The session helped me broaden my perspective and inspired me to work towards turning my passion for hacking into an ethical profession.

Hence, I started focusing on building my skill set in ethical hacking and prepared myself by learning programming languages and intrusion prevention techniques online. In order to test my skills to test, I ended up working for the cyber cell departments of various law enforcement agencies and a few private firms and helped them fix their cyber security problems. However, I never levied any fees for any of my work as I felt, I still needed to learn more.

How did you solve cybercrime cases for some of the biggest MNC's in the world, such as Twitter, Yahoo!, Facebook, Nokia, Blackberry, PayPal, Skype, Google, Apple, Microsoft to name a few?

In 2014, I stumbled upon an unusual cross-site scripting vulnerability on Go Daddy’s platform which later I helped resolve. The company even offered me a job but I wasn’t ready to accept a job. I wanted to still play the field to explore and learn more about various web vulnerabilities myself and as a hobby, I started participating in various bug bounty programmes of Google, Facebook among others to test my skills. While this self-learning phase continued for a while, I was finally starting to take up freelance projects and slowly started working towards my vision to build my own brand and take it globally soon after I registered Avalance Global Solutions with the help of a couple of friends, who believed in my vision and were willing to support me.

Tell us about your current business plans in the UAE

The road is always under construction. Avalance Global Solutions is growing at a rapid pace.We are envisioned to make Avalance Global Solutions, a leader in blockchain security in the world within the next three to five years. Further, we aim to become a company that can cater to all consumer needs in the web3 cybersecurity space. In 2019, Global cybersecurity market size stood at USD 156.5 billion. In the next three to five years, we plan to capture four to five percent of it.

From a product standpoint, we have plans to work using artificial intelligence and machine learning. These days, humans are extremely vulnerable and susceptible to cyberattacks; and we are coming up with a product in the human security segment, that too within a year.

Apart from this, Avalance Global Solutions is looking at geographical expansion. The company entered the UAE market in 2019 and our revenue touched triple-digit despite the Covid-19 pandemic. This year, we plan to grow bigger and we are building our product engineering team in Dubai, which we plan to expand by hiring more people in the region. We are also looking to commence operations in Abu Dhabi by the end of the current fiscal year.

At the moment, we are actively involved in raising Series-A Funding, which we plan to use for ramping up operations in the UAE, by doubling our engineering and sales teams and scaling up our flagship platform – AISOC and ZEUSTRIDE.

How did you manage to implement artificial intelligence (AI)-based anti-piracy solutions which have saved millions for film producers?

In 2020, we launched the world’s first AI-based solutions to stop online piracy. Avalance’s proprietary web crawling technology is capable of simulating human behavior in searching for infringing content across the web. A specialised team of global copyright experts along with automated multi-step mitigation techniques allow us to rapidly eliminate large volumes of infringing content instantly.

Tell us about cryptocurrency security?

We all have seen how technology has grown in the last few years. Web3 promises to change the facet of every sector, and I am glad that Avalance Global Solutions is enhancing by providing security to blockchain technology. The purpose of the company is to build security infrastructure for the blockchain and cybersecurity industry.