In early 2016, terrorists attacked the Pathankot airbase in Punjab. The perimeter had cameras, infrared sensors and motion detectors — but the surveillance network itself was under attack. Hackers were launching denial-of-service attacks, trying to jam and intercept the data flowing from the perimeter walls to the command centres. That is when Pantherun Technologies, a little-known deeptech startup from Bengaluru, entered the fray. The company says its encryption was deployed on that network — and the attacks were thwarted.
Pantherun was founded in 2019 by Srinivas Shekar and Tiffany Chan. Shekar has spent 30 years in the industry, starting at Rockwell in the United States and later leading an Indian company that was acquired by Intel. Chan ran operations for a Taiwanese manufacturing company. Together they set out to build core encryption technology from scratch in India — in software and in silicon — for the networks the world runs on: defence, railways, telecom, automotive and industrial systems.
The idea at the heart of Pantherun is disarmingly simple: remove the key exchange. Modern encryption relies on AES, a gold standard so strong it could take a century of effort to break — but the key that locks the data must first travel to the other end so it can be unlocked, and that journey is the weak point. Pantherun’s AI-driven approach generates a key to encrypt each packet at the source and another to decrypt it at the destination, drawing on a shared history of past data packets, so no key is ever exchanged, transmitted or exposed. And because the encryption happens as the packet is processed, the company says there is no drop in speed and no delay — a difference that matters enormously when a microsecond can decide whether a train signal turns green.
That speed is why Pantherun’s technology now sits inside systems where failure is not an option. It secures signalling networks for metro rail projects, where encrypted communication stops anyone tampering with the electronics that prevent collisions. It protects surveillance systems in India’s Northeast. It runs on the networks of Indian Railways and Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s second-largest transport company, and with Vodafone Idea and Bharat Electronics. Intel selected Pantherun to provide encryption for data movement inside its Lunar Lake AI laptop chips. Jaguar Land Rover and Rolls-Royce Engine Controls are integrating the technology into connected vehicle systems, and a global image-sensor company uses it on sensors designed to shut down dangerous machinery the instant they detect a human nearby.
The growth has followed the deployments. Pantherun closed a $12 million Series A round in October 2025, led by Sahasrar Capital Investors and Lucky Investment Managers, with backing from SIDBI Ventures, Capital2B, 8X Ventures, GrowX Ventures and Piper Serica. The company says revenue grew from around $1 million in FY25 to more than $5 million in the year that followed, and it has built an order pipeline of nearly $120 million to be executed over the next three to four years as it moves deeper into railway signalling and 5G telecom infrastructure across Europe and the United States. The team has grown to more than 80 people across India, Taiwan and Europe, and the company has filed three patents, with two granted and more in the pipeline. It has also open-sourced parts of its stack as the Pepper platform, so more engineers can build on it.
What comes next is faster still: encryption at 100 gigabits per second today, with 400 gigabits per second the target, alongside post-quantum products for hyperscale data centres — and a $35–40 million Series B round being prepared. From an airbase surveillance network to the signalling that keeps trains apart and the chips inside laptops, Pantherun is proving that the most sensitive encryption of all can be built in India, by an Indian company, from the ground up.
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