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Saket Modi (July 31, 1990) is an entrepreneur, Co-founder and CEO of Lucideus, a Cybersecurity and Digital Business Risk Quantification company, based out of Palo Alto, California. A computer science engineer by education, he founded Lucideus in 2012 while in his final year of engineering. Lucideus was incubated from IIT Bombay and backed by John T. Chambers, the former executive chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, Lucideus currently protects the digital infrastructure of multiple global companies with its platform called SAFE. Saket has been recognized by the Government of India with the title of "Champion of Change" in 2017. He is a public speaker about ethical hacking and computer security.

Early life
Modi was born and raised in Kolkata, India. His father is a businessman himself and has had a significant influence on Modi’s entrepreneurial acumen. Saket attended school at Lakshmipat Singhania Academy, where his curiosity was recognised and encouraged. While Modi was in high school, he led the school’s chess and table tennis teams and also earned a degree on the Grand Piano from the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, London.

In school, Saket was often found in the Computer laboratory and it is there that he realised he could access the Chemistry question paper stored in a password protected file. By using a simple ‘brute force’ tool, which was available for free on the Internet, he was able to unlock the paper. He later confessed to his teacher but this small incident helped Modi realise his potential and interest to further pursue a career in Cybersecurity. In 2012, he received his undergraduate engineering degree from the LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur with a major in Computer Science. As an undergraduate student, Saket conducted several hands-on workshops on ethical hacking at Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) campuses across India.

Career
In 2012, while in his final year of engineering, Saket started Lucideus at the incubator of IIT Bombay, along with Vidit Baxi and Rahul Tyagi. For capital, they used their personal savings. In 2013, Lucideus inaugurated its first office in New Delhi. Since then, the company has been awarded contracts to work with multiple global companies. Lucideus was responsible for the end-to-end security of BHIM, the Unified Mobile based payment platform designed by the National Payments Corporation of India, Government of India.

Being a first time entrepreneur, Modi realised early the importance of getting the right set of investors and advisors by his side. In 2017, Lucideus raised its first angel investment round of $2 million with investors such as Sri Shivananda (CTO, PayPal), Rajan Anandan (Managing Director, Sequoia Capital), Victor Menezes (ex-Senior Vice-chairman, Citibank), Vikas Agnihotri (Operating Partner, Softbank Group), Mickey Doshi (CEO, Credit Suisse, India), among others. Saket Modi, while speaking at a public event, was totally unaware that John T. Chambers, the former executive chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, was also speaking at the same event, although on a different floor. Modi was introduced to John by a mutual acquaintance on the same day. An interesting anecdote is how Chambers got hooked to the concept after Modi’s 20-second pitch about Lucideus and his vision for cybersecurity - why quantification of digital business risk is the way forward.

Later, John T. Chambers went on to lead the Series A funding for Lucideus of $5million in 2018, through his personal venture arm - JC2 Ventures.

In 2019, Lucideus expanded its operations to the USA and other markets in the APAC region, and shifted their headquarters to Palo Alto, California.

Public appearances
He is a regular speaker on various subjects of information security and entrepreneurship at International Forums like Mobile World Congress, CeBIT (Germany), Forbes Under 30 Global Summit (Boston), Confederation of Indian Industry, Cyber Tech (Israel), ASSOCHAM, Data Security Council of India, ISACA, TiE, TED (conference).