Chandrashekhar Basavanna

CEO & Founder SecPod

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Chandrashekhar Basavanna is the founder and chief executive of SecPod, a Bengaluru-headquartered cybersecurity product company he started in 2008 and has run ever since. SecPod’s argument is a contrarian one in an industry built around detection: the company positions its Saner platform as prevention-first, on the premise that most breaches exploit known, fixable weaknesses, and that the useful product is therefore one that finds a vulnerability or misconfiguration and remediates it automatically rather than one that raises an alert and leaves the work to the customer. That thesis runs through both the endpoint product, Saner CVEM, and the cloud-native application protection platform, Saner Cloud, which reached general availability in March 2025. Basavanna came to it after roughly a decade building software at Novell, Hewlett-Packard, Xalted Networks and Marlabs, the last of which put him in charge of a network-security operation immediately before he left to found SecPod.

Career Highlights

• Founded SecPod in 2008 and has led it as CEO for the company’s entire history, now approaching two decades.
• Built the Saner platform around continuous vulnerability and exposure management, pairing assessment and prioritisation with automated remediation from a single agent rather than shipping findings to a separate patching tool.
• Launched Saner Cloud to general availability on 19 March 2025, extending the prevention-first approach into a cloud-native application protection platform with automated remediation across multi-cloud environments.
• Grew SecPod to R&D offices in Bangalore, Poland and Vietnam and a customer base spanning North America, Latin America, MENA, APAC and Europe.
• Co-founded a second venture, OrgTree, in 2015, where he is also listed as a director.
• Managed the StillSecure network-security operation at Marlabs in 2007-2008, the role immediately preceding the founding of SecPod.
• Contributing author at CPO Magazine, writing on vulnerability management, exposure reduction and preventive security practice.

Professional Journey

Basavanna trained as an instrumentation engineer, taking a Bachelor of Engineering at Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering between 1994 and 1998, and entered the software industry in 1999 as a senior software engineer at Novell. The next several years were spent inside large engineering organisations: Novell until 2003, then Hewlett-Packard’s Bangalore operation, then Xalted Networks from 2004, where he moved from team lead into technical and senior management. The pattern of those years is a steady shift from writing software to running the people who write it.

The move that pointed directly at SecPod came in 2007, when he joined Marlabs as a senior manager with responsibility for its StillSecure operation, handling it from technical, managerial and administrative angles. StillSecure was a network-security business, and the posting put him close to the working reality of enterprise vulnerability and compliance tooling. He left after about a year.

SecPod was established in 2008. Rather than chase the detection and alerting market, Basavanna built the company around the unglamorous half of the problem: finding the known weaknesses in an estate and closing them. That produced the Saner family of products, with Saner CVEM providing continuous visibility and remediation across enterprise devices and infrastructure, backed by SecPod’s own vulnerability intelligence work. The company describes its purpose as helping organisations reduce risk early and simplify security decisions, and it has grown into a global operation with engineering centres in Bangalore, Poland and Vietnam.

In March 2025 the company extended the same model to cloud with Saner Cloud, a CNAPP announced as generally available on 19 March. The framing in the launch was explicit: where conventional cloud security tools concentrate on detection, Saner Cloud uses automated, AI-assisted remediation to close exposures in multi-cloud environments in real time. Alongside SecPod, Basavanna co-founded a second company, OrgTree, in 2015. He also writes publicly on the subject as a contributing author at CPO Magazine, where his pieces argue the same case the products do, that prevention is cheaper and more tractable than response.

Education

Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering (SJCE)

Bachelor of Engineering, Instrumentation, 1994-1998