Jayesh Gadewar: Geek who leads from the front

MHM stood for Mumbai House Mafia, inspired by a band that Gadewar and his friends used to like, Swedish House Mafia, an electronic dance music band.

At MHMGaming, his friends and he built and managed the systems they needed, and negotiated contracts with local data centres for rack space to keep their hardware and run their Linux servers. “It wasn’t super profitable,” he says with a laugh. “There was no UPI or payment gateways back then.”

Later, during college, they built a software solution—competing in a hackathon—that would keep track of a bunch of cameras and send alerts to the right people, in order to help old people in their homes if they had an accident like falling down badly, for example.

Fast forward to 2023, and Gadewar has an engineering degree from Mumbai University, and is a co-founder of Riversys Technologies, better known as Scrut Automation, for its product that helps businesses automate some of their GRC requirements—GRC stands for governance, risk and compliance.

Founded in late 2021 by Aayush Ghosh Choudhury, Gadewar and Kush Kaushik, Scrut Automation has raised about $3.1 million in funding from investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Endiya Partners.

Here as well, “everything geeky comes to me, I lead the engineering and the product”, Gadewar says.

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The idea for Scrut Automation came from having to deal with their own internal compliance needs at a previous venture they were working on, Gadewar says. It was, in fact, for this startup, that Choudhury was trying to build, that Gadewar started working, just as he was finishing college.

They were developing a collaboration solution that large businesses could use with their vendors. They had to ensure several compliance certifications like ISO 27001 and SOC 2, and “it fell to me as the only geeky person at the time”, Gadewar recalls. He’d built a set of automations to avoid tedious manual processes.

That startup didn’t scale, but it hit them that they could “productise” these internal tools.

View the full list of Forbes India 30 Under 30 2023 here

Today Scrut has 70 engineers, with about 200 enterprise customers in markets, including the US and EU. The bulk of revenues come from Asia-Pacific. The company is also in the process of setting up a team in the US.

With a current annual recurring revenue of about $1.3 million, the aim is to hit $10 million annual run rate by 2024, focusing on the US, EU and Asia-Pacific.

“Scrut’s founders are hustlers, full of energy, and with complementary skills,” Sateesh Andra, managing director at Endiya Partners, says. “And mid-market companies can benefit greatly from Scrut’s single-point access to all their compliance and risk needs.”

“The security and compliance space has a lot of noise,” Gadewar says. “It needs a bit of cleaning up.” The vision for Scrut Automation is that it becomes a trusted platform for every cloud-native, mid-market company’s chief information security officer (CISO), he says.

Scrut is also developing a marketplace where CISOs can find external consultants and experts to manage security needs, Choudhury had said in 2022, it raised funding from Lightspeed and Endiya.

“If we can replace 15 different tools with one high-level dashboard for them, then we’ve done our job,” Gadewar says.