Shankar Jayaraman, CISOGenie Co-Founder and CEO: “CISOGenie’s Agentic AI platform is a game-changer for GRC. It moves beyond static checklists, using intelligent AI agents to create a proactive, dynamic defense that ensures complete data sovereignty.”

The Silicon Review

When Shankar Jayaraman co-founded CySavvi Solutions India Private Limited in November 2024, he was not just starting another cybersecurity company. He was solving a problem he knew firsthand as a former CISO. Traditional Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) platforms were riddled with challenges: too complex, prohibitively expensive, and most concerning, they required organizations to hand over sensitive integration credentials to third-party systems. For a security leader, that was not a solution, it was a nightmare. Out of that frustration came CISOGenie, the company’s flagship brand. Built in Bengaluru, the platform reimagines how enterprises and service providers handle compliance and risk. At its core, CISOGenie is an AI-powered GRC solution that keeps ownership of credentials and data firmly with the customer. It combines automation with security-first design, making compliance faster, risk management smarter, and audits far less painful.

The platform is equally tailored for direct enterprise clients such as CIOs, CISOs, and CROs, as well as service providers like MSPs, MSSPs, and vCISOs. With its multi-tenant, white-label ready architecture, CISOGenie enables managed providers to extend scalable AI-driven compliance and security services to their clients without adding layers of complexity. Its Agentic AI automates critical but time-consuming processes like evidence collection and reporting, helping organizations achieve continuous compliance across both IT and Operational Technology environments. In less than a year, CISOGenie has attracted clients including Akasa Air, YouX, and DigiAlert. For them, the platform is not just about ticking regulatory boxes. It is about building a stronger, more resilient security posture without increasing operational burden.

For Jayaraman, the mission is personal. CISOGenie is not a theoretical product designed in a vacuum. It is a platform shaped by lived experience and built for the leaders who shoulder the responsibility of securing today’s digital enterprises.

In conversation with Shankar Jayaraman, Co-Founder and CEO of CISOGenie

CISOGenie describes its GRC platform as “built by CISOs for CISOs.” How does this insider perspective shape your platform’s design and capabilities compared to traditional solutions?

Our “built by CISOs for CISOs” philosophy means we understand the real-world pain points of security leaders. Unlike traditional solutions that are often rigid and process-heavy, CISOGenie is designed to be highly intuitive and efficient. This perspective led us to prioritize features like:

No Credentials Stored: We directly address the CISO’s primary fear by not storing client credentials on our platform.
Data Sovereignty: We give you the choice to store data in your environment, ensuring we never touch your sensitive information.
Actionable Insights: Instead of just a flood of data, we provide clear, executive-level dashboards that translate technical risks into business impact.
Practical Automation: Our automation focuses on the most tedious tasks that consume a CISO’s time, such as evidence collection and control mapping, allowing them to focus on strategy.

Your platform leverages “sincere AI” for compliance, audits, and risk management. Can you elaborate on what sets this AI approach apart in delivering trust, precision, and transparency?

“Sincere AI” means our AI is not just a marketing term; it’s genuinely designed to solve real problems with transparency and trust as core principles. What sets it apart is:

Trust: Our Agentic AI works locally within the customer’s environment using secure, local credentials. The platform never sees or stores these credentials, giving customers complete control and trust.
Precision: Our AI agents are use-case driven, meticulously trained to perform specific tasks, such as precisely identifying and collecting evidence for a particular control. This ensures a high degree of accuracy and relevance.
Transparency: We believe in making the AI’s actions clear. Our platform provides a detailed, auditable trail of all automated activities, allowing security and audit teams to see exactly what evidence was collected, when, and from where.

With features like automated gap assessments, policy creation, and AI-guided vendor-agnostic controls, how does CISOGenie ensure faster and more accurate compliance readiness?

CISOGenie accelerates compliance readiness by eliminating manual bottlenecks. Our AI automates the initial gap assessment, giving you a clear picture of your compliance standing in minutes, not weeks. The platform then uses this data to guide you through policy creation and implementation, automatically mapping controls across frameworks to avoid redundant work. This not only makes the process faster but also ensures accuracy by standardizing the approach and providing a single source of truth for all compliance activities.

The platform supports multiple global and industry-specific frameworks. How do you address the complexity of adapting to different compliance standards across geographies?

We address this complexity through our unified, AI-powered framework mapping. Our platform is designed to ingest and curate controls from numerous global standards (e.g., ISO 27001, NIST CSF) and India-specific regulations (e.g., SEBI CSCRF, RBI guidelines). Our AI identifies overlapping controls and helps you implement them once to satisfy multiple requirements. This gives you a holistic view and prevents the chaos of managing different frameworks in separate silos, making global compliance manageable.

Risk management in CISOGenie integrates external exposure tracking, dark web monitoring, and Third Party Vendor insights. How does this holistic approach enhance security posture for your clients?

Traditional risk management often focuses on internal systems. CISOGenie provides a holistic view by integrating internal risk data with external intelligence. External attack surface management identifies and protects against vulnerabilities visible from the outside. Dark web monitoring alerts you to potential credential leaks or threats targeting your organization.

CISOGenie’s Agentic AI delivers a game-changing approach to vendor risk. Our solution is fully autonomous and intelligently scans for new third-party vendors and applications in your ecosystem. It then provides a clear risk rating by assessing their compliance posture, historical security incidents, and overall cyber hygiene. This demystifies your supply chain risk and ensures you have a continuous, real-time view of your vendor landscape.

This comprehensive approach allows our clients to move from a reactive, internal-only view to a proactive strategy that anticipates and mitigates threats from all angles, dramatically enhancing their security posture.

For organizations without in-house IT teams, how does CISOGenie’s partner ecosystem

ensure a seamless and stress-free compliance journey?

CISOGenie’s partner ecosystem is crucial for these organizations. We have a network of implementation and audit partners who are trained and certified on our platform. These partners provide expert implementation services, offering strategic guidance and hands-on support. They use our platform to manage the client’s compliance journey, ensuring a seamless, stress-free process without the need for an in-house expert. This model allows businesses to benefit from CISO-level expertise and automated GRC without the associated cost and complexity.

What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

The future for CISOGenie is all about deeper automation and proactive intelligence. We are continuously enhancing our Agentic AI capabilities to move towards predictive compliance, where the platform will anticipate regulatory changes and emerging risks before they become critical. We are also expanding our support for new global and regional compliance frameworks and integrations. For our customers, this means a future where GRC is not just a solved problem, but a strategic asset that provides continuous security and a powerful competitive edge.

Our vision is to evolve beyond IT and OT compliance, providing comprehensive support for Quality and Environmental frameworks. We aim to become the one-stop solution for all technology and quality compliances worldwide.

Tell us about your team and you other co-founder.

It’s a great question, and I’m very proud to talk about the team and my co-founder. Our strength at CISOGenie isn’t just in our technology, but in the incredible talent building it.

Our team is a powerhouse of young, energetic, and passionate individuals who are hungry to learn and innovate. They are the driving force behind our rapid development cycle, constantly challenging the status quo and bringing fresh ideas to the table. Their dedication and enthusiasm are what enable us to deliver a truly game-changing platform that stays ahead of a constantly evolving compliance landscape.

As for my co-founder Balachandran Sivakumar, he is a seasoned veteran in security and platform development, the “brain” behind the entire architectural design. Their deep experience and foresight were critical in building a platform that is inherently modularized, allowing us to adapt and add new features seamlessly. They ensured from day one that the platform would be highly scalable, so we can grow with our clients from small enterprises to large corporations. Most importantly, they designed it with pluggable components, which is the very foundation of our Agentic AI approach. This allows us to integrate new technologies and compliance frameworks quickly, providing a level of flexibility and speed that traditional GRC tools simply cannot match.