Bharath Madhusudan

Co-Founder and Former Chief Executive Officer Securly

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Bharath Madhusudan is a network-security engineer who co-founded Securly and ran it as chief executive for twelve years. The company started from an unfashionable premise for the early 2010s: that the interesting problem in school internet filtering was not blocking sites but noticing when a child in distress types something that should worry an adult. Securly built web filtering, device management and self-harm detection for K-12 schools and grew to more than 20,000 schools and some 20 million students a day. Madhusudan stayed in the chair through the company’s 2021 acquisition by the private-equity firm Golden Gate Capital and stepped down in October 2024, handing over to Tammy Mank Wincup. Before Securly he spent his career in network security engineering, including architecting firewall and intrusion-prevention components at Huawei Symantec.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Securly and served as its chief executive for twelve years, until October 2024.
• Grew the platform to more than 20,000 schools and roughly 20 million students daily.
• Led the company through its 2021 acquisition by Golden Gate Capital and continued as CEO of the portfolio business afterwards.
• Architected the application firewall and intrusion prevention components of Huawei Symantec’s next-generation network security system, leading a Beijing-based engineering team.
• Earlier security engineering work at McAfee and Qualys.
• Active as an angel investor in education technology since around 2021.

Professional Journey

Madhusudan trained as a computer scientist, with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland and a master’s from Washington University in St. Louis, and went into network security. At Huawei Symantec he worked as an architect on the company’s next-generation security system, designing the application firewall and intrusion prevention components and leading a team of developers based in Beijing; sources also place earlier security engineering work at McAfee and at Qualys, though without dates or titles.

Securly was founded in 2012 or 2013 - sources disagree, and the disagreement is recorded rather than resolved here - by Madhusudan with Vinay Mahadik and Nikita Chikate. The product began in the territory Madhusudan knew, filtering and network policy, but the company’s identity came from pushing past it: rather than treating a school’s internet connection purely as a compliance problem, Securly built monitoring intended to surface signals of self-harm and crisis to the adults responsible for a student. The 2024 announcement of his departure claimed the platform had by then contributed to saving more than 2,200 student lives.

The company took venture backing from investors including Defy Partners and Owl Ventures, and in 2021 Golden Gate Capital agreed to acquire it from its shareholders - among them co-founder Vinay Mahadik. Madhusudan did not leave with the transaction. He continued as co-founder and chief executive of Securly as a Golden Gate portfolio company, which meant running the business through the shift from venture-scale growth to private-equity ownership, and through the post-pandemic period in which one-to-one device programmes made student-safety software a default line item in district budgets rather than an optional one.

He stepped down on 28 October 2024. Securly announced Tammy Mank Wincup, previously chief operating officer at EVERFI and an executive at Rethink Education and Get Well, as his successor, effective immediately. No continuing role at the company was announced for Madhusudan, and none has been identified since. His only publicly traceable activity in the period after is angel investing in education technology, which aggregated records date to around 2021 and describe as a small portfolio; the specific companies reported differ between sources and are not asserted here.

Education

University of Maryland

BS, Computer Science

Washington University in St. Louis

MS, Computer Science