Built, not bought: Crafting India's next-gen cloud cybersecurity infrastructure

Deep tech meets grounded grit in this story of engineering from scratch. From routers to roaming clients, here's how one homegrown team is rethinking scale, security, and sovereignty-without the noise, just performance

- BHARTI TREHAN

In a landscape crowded with buzzwords and venture-funded velocity, AnexGATE has quietly charted its own course. Founded in the mid-2000s by Rahul Gupta and now steered on the tech front by CTO Hitesh Dharmdasani, the company has grown without outside capital, without grandstanding, and most importantly—without shortcuts. “We've always preferred bootstrapping,” says Dharmdasani, who hails from a business family and carries forward a mindset of ownership and discipline. That mindset has shaped not just the company’s operations, but its entire philosophy of product development.

Owning the stack, end to end

AnexGATE didn’t begin with a sweeping vision of vertical integration. It earned its way there. Initially, the team used third-party software on available servers to build the first conceptual firewall products. But soon, it became clear that to build differentiated features, at the pace and precision they envisioned, they had to go deeper. Much deeper.

“Third parties couldn’t match our ambition,” recalls Dharmdasani. That realisation pushed the company to design its own hardware, write its own software, and eventually control every critical layer of its stack.

By August 2023, AnexGATE’s hardware designs were fully its own, even though manufacturing is outsourced to EMS providers. It’s a practical model, with intellectual control at the core. The result? A vertically integrated security appliance ecosystem that’s built in India, for India.

Product focus: doing more with less

Today, AnexGATE’s offerings span three core product lines: