Prophaze: AI Shield of India
India stands at the cusp of a transformative technological era. Artificial Intelligence is no longer confined to research labs or pilot programs. It now drives agriculture, governance, education, healthcare, energy infrastructure, financial systems, and national digital platforms.
As AI adoption accelerates, the focus has shifted beyond innovation. India’s conversation is now about AI security, digital sovereignty, cloud-native resilience, and secure-by-design architectures. At this pivotal moment, Prophaze’s journey intersected with a national milestone.
A Defining Moment at the AI India Dialogue
Following the AI India Summit 2026, Lakshmi Das, Co-Founder and COO of Prophaze, was invited to the Hon’ble Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Office at Seva Theerth to participate in a high-level discussion with selected AI founders and deep-tech innovators from across the country. She was the only cybersecurity representative from Kerala in this strategic dialogue.
The discussion focused on how India can responsibly scale Artificial Intelligence across key sectors including agriculture, education, governance, healthcare, and public digital infrastructure. While the ambition to lead in AI innovation is clear, an equally important theme emerged: AI systems must be secure by design.
AI innovation is critical, but it must be secure by design. Lakshmi highlighted that India’s AI ambitions must be supported by strong cybersecurity architecture, ensuring resilience, data integrity, application-layer protection, and long-term digital sovereignty.
Evolution of Prophaze in Securing AI Infrastructure
Prophaze was founded in 2019 with a focused mission to secure modern cloud-native and microservices-based applications. As enterprises and government systems migrated toward Kubernetes environments, API-driven architectures, and distributed cloud infrastructure, traditional Web Application Firewall models struggled to adapt.
Prophaze was built specifically to address these emerging gaps in cloud-native security and API protection.
Today, the platform protects over 2 million applications globally and processes more than one billion secure requests every day. It secures API-first and cloud-native infrastructures while mitigating Layer 7 attacks, bot intrusions, API abuse, and large-scale distributed threats.
As AI systems increasingly operate through APIs and interconnected services, application-layer security has become critical. Prophaze operates at this intelligent security layer, protecting the digital foundations upon which AI systems depend.
Global Recognition and Industry Validation
Prophaze’s technological leadership has earned international recognition and industry validation.
- Recognized as a High Performer by G2 (Fall 2024)
- Positioned as Overall Leader and Product Leader in the Leadership Compass for Web Application Firewall by KuppingerCole (2022 & 2024)
- Featured in Gartner Market Guides for API Protection and Cloud WAAP
- Acknowledged in Gartner® Peer Insights Voice of the Customer (2025) for API Security
- Strategic collaborator with Intel
- Partnered with Keltron to strengthen India’s indigenous cybersecurity ecosystem
- Core Committee Member – Nominated to the National Cyber Security Research Council (NCSRC), contributing to broader national cybersecurity initiatives
These recognitions reflect both technological depth and global trust in Prophaze’s ability to secure critical digital infrastructure and AI-driven cloud-native environments.
AI and the Expanding Threat Landscape
Modern AI ecosystems rely heavily on APIs, cloud-native deployments, distributed microservices, and real-time data integrations. Each of these components expands the digital attack surface. AI-powered cyberattacks, automated bot networks, API exploitation, business logic abuse, and machine-speed intrusions are becoming increasingly sophisticated.
Cybersecurity can no longer be treated as an afterthought. It must be embedded into system architecture from the beginning. Secure AI requires intelligent, adaptive, and real-time protection mechanisms that evolve as quickly as the systems they defend.
During the AI dialogue, the importance of aligning innovation with security was clear. Sustainable progress in AI depends on building resilient, secure digital foundations.
A Milestone for India's Deep-Tech Ecosystem
Lakshmi’s participation in the Prime Minister’s Office dialogue represents an important milestone not only for Prophaze but also for India’s growing deep-tech ecosystem.
Being the growing Indian cybersecurity representative in a national AI strategy discussion highlights the state’s increasing contribution to India’s digital transformation, AI security innovation, and cloud-native cybersecurity development. It reflects a shift from being a technology talent hub to becoming an active contributor in shaping national technology strategy.
Securing India’s AI Future
India’s AI ambitions are bold and transformative. However, sustainable leadership in Artificial Intelligence depends on trust. Trust in systems. Trust in data. Trust in infrastructure.
Prophaze remains committed to protecting critical digital infrastructure and enabling enterprises and government institutions to build secure, scalable, and future-ready AI ecosystems.
The invitation to participate in the AI strategy dialogue marks a proud milestone in a journey that began with a startup vision in 2018 and has evolved into contributing to conversations shaping India’s technological future.
More importantly, it reinforces responsibility. As India builds intelligent systems at scale, they must be built on secure foundations. The future of AI in India will not be defined by intelligence alone. It will be defined by how securely that intelligence is designed, deployed, and protected.
That is the mission we continue to pursue.
The AI Battlefield Is Already Here
We are entering a new cybersecurity reality where intent alone is enough. Today, a teenager with an internet connection and a free AI chatbot can generate phishing campaigns, bypass payloads, or malicious scripts, with no coding background required.
AI has erased the gap between capability and expertise. While it accelerates productivity, automates security operations, and enhances real-time defense, it has also democratised cybercrime. DDoS attacks are now AI-coordinated at scale.
Cyberwarfare has become crowdsourced, gamified, and global. From geopolitical conflicts to attacks on public infrastructure and even non-critical digital platforms, the message is clear: nothing connected is truly non-critical anymore. During periods of national tension, Indian digital infrastructure faced tens of millions of malicious requests within hours, yet every Prophaze-protected entity remained online.
That resilience was not signature-based defence; it was intelligence-driven protection predicting intent, correlating coordinated bot behaviour across continents, and autonomously mitigating threats in milliseconds.
AI now writes both the attack and the defence. The defining question is no longer whether AI will be used but who builds the shield. India does not need to import digital protection. The shield is already here. Built in India. Made for India. It’s called Prophaze.
