1968. New Delhi. One man. One impossible task.
Build India's external intelligence agency. From scratch.
No blueprint to follow. No precedent to reference. No allied nation offering a template. Just a direct mandate and a near-empty room.
His name was Rameshwar Nath Kao.
Most people have never heard of him. That's exactly how he wanted it.
The Man Who Built RAW
Before 1968, India had no dedicated external intelligence agency. Think about that. The world's largest democracy, surrounded by hostile neighbours, nuclear tensions rising, Cold War alliances shifting — and no independent eyes and ears beyond its borders.
Kao was a career intelligence officer. Quiet. Methodical. Obsessively private. He'd spent years in the Intelligence Bureau, studying how the world's best agencies operated — the CIA, MI6, Mossad. He understood their strengths. More importantly, he understood what India needed was none of them.
India needed something built for India.
When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi gave him the task of creating the Research and Analysis Wing, Kao didn't ask for time. He didn't ask for a massive budget. He started with 250 officers and a conviction that would reshape South Asia.
250 Officers Changed History
Within three years, RAW had become one of the most effective intelligence agencies on the planet. Not the loudest. Not the most funded. The most effective.
The results speak for themselves.
In 1971, RAW's intelligence work was instrumental in the liberation of Bangladesh. Kao's officers had been operating inside East Pakistan for months, building networks, gathering intelligence, understanding the ground reality in ways that satellites and diplomats never could. When the war came, India didn't walk in blind. RAW had already mapped the battlefield.
Then came Sikkim. Through careful intelligence work and diplomatic manoeuvring backed by RAW's ground operations, India secured Sikkim's merger in 1975. The map of South Asia changed. Permanently.
Kao's officers became known as the 'Kaoboys.' They never held press conferences. They never wrote memoirs. They changed history from the shadows and disappeared back into them.
Kao himself retired quietly. No interviews. No book deals. No statues. He believed that the best intelligence work is the kind nobody ever knows about.
The New Battlefield
Here's what Kao couldn't have predicted: the battlefield would move.
Not to another border. Not to another ocean. To your pocket. Your browser. Your UPI app. Your family's WhatsApp group.
India in 2025 is under siege. Not from armies. From algorithms.
The numbers are staggering:
- 702 cyber attacks hit Indian systems every single minute. Not per day. Not per hour. Per minute.
- ₹22,845 crore is stolen from Indians every year through cyber fraud. That's retirement savings. College funds. Emergency money. Gone.
- Deepfakes are targeting ordinary families. Your mother's face on a video she never made. Your father's voice asking for money he never needed.
- Fake UPI portals are draining bank accounts in seconds. They look exactly like the real thing. By the time you realise, the money is three states away.
- Malicious browser extensions — the ones you installed to block ads or check grammar — are silently harvesting your passwords and banking details.
This is not a future threat. This is today. Right now. While you're reading this.
The Industry That Forgot You
So where is the cybersecurity industry?
Selling ₹50 lakh enterprise contracts to Fortune 500 companies. Building dashboards for CISOs in air-conditioned SOC rooms. Attending conferences in Las Vegas and Singapore. Publishing whitepapers nobody reads.
And the common Indian? The college student in Indore? The shopkeeper in Salem? The retired teacher in Patna?
They get a YouTube video saying "don't click suspicious links" and a prayer.
That's not protection. That's abandonment.
The cybersecurity industry decided long ago that protecting ordinary people isn't profitable. Enterprise is where the money is. Let the consumers figure it out themselves.
1.4 billion Indians were left to fend for themselves in a digital war they didn't start and don't understand.
The Origin of Seerror
Seerror was born from the same conviction that built RAW.
Not from a boardroom. Not from a VC pitch. Not from a Stanford dorm room.
From a bedroom in Bengaluru.
One person. No investors. No co-founders. No office. No funding. No connections. Just the same stubborn belief that Kao carried in 1968 — that when your people are vulnerable, you don't wait for permission to protect them.
I looked at the cybersecurity landscape in India and saw exactly what Kao saw in 1968 when he looked at India's intelligence capabilities: a dangerous gap that nobody was filling.
So I started building.
The Mission
Kao started with 250 officers. We're starting with 1.
But the mission is the same:
- Enter hostile territory — the dark web, malicious infrastructure, the spaces where threats are born before they reach you.
- Neutralise threats before they reach our people — not after the damage is done, not after the money is gone, not after the deepfake has spread.
- Operate where no one else will go — in the gaps the industry ignores, for the people the market has abandoned.
4 products are already live. 5 more are coming. Every single one is free.
Not freemium. Not "free for 14 days." Not "free with limited features."
Free. Because protection is not a luxury product.
Why Free?
Because Kao didn't charge citizens for national security.
Because the retired teacher in Patna deserves the same digital protection as the CEO in Mumbai.
Because if 1.4 billion people need a shield, you don't put a price tag on it and call it a business model.
The cybersecurity industry will tell you this isn't sustainable. That you can't protect people without revenue. That this model doesn't work.
RAW was also called impossible in 1968.
India's Digital RAW
Kao built RAW to protect India's borders.
We're building Seerror to protect India's people.
Silent. Relentless. Everywhere.
Built for humans. Against the machine.
The origin story of RAW started with one man in a room who refused to accept that India couldn't protect itself. The origin story of Seerror starts the same way.
The room is smaller. The budget is zero. The battlefield is digital.
But the conviction is identical.
India's people deserve protection. And someone has to build it.
We've started.