Abhishek Waghmare
Co-founder · Chief Business Officer
Heads the company's commercial and research functions. Responsible for finance, business development, hardware engineering, and the long-term research roadmap.
IIT Kanpur · IIT Bombay
— About
Forensics technology for everyone
— The journey
How Chakra came to exist.
In their final years of college, Abhishek Waghmare and Shubham Pandey took on a problem Indian investigators kept running into. The digital device that holds the evidence. The court record that has to survive cross-examination. The gap between the two. They won the Kavach national hackathon, the Smart India Hackathon, the K2W challenge, and several state-level competitions for working on it.
At the Kavach finals the Bureau of Police Research and Development advised that the prototype should be productized. The Ministry of Home Affairs followed up directly. The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, host of C3iHub, India's largest cyber-physical systems research hub, invited the work into its R&D labs. A grant under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) funded the next phase. Their institution cleared an academic leave so the work could continue without interruption.
The work started in memory forensics. The accessibility gap became visible early. Indian investigators were paying foreign-tool prices for software that was not built for Indian evidence law. Section 65B certificates were assembled by hand. The chain of custody did not match what the statute required. Two and a half years of focused engineering produced what Chakra ships today.
Chakra Intel is in the field. State cyber crime cells, central investigation agencies, and forensic laboratories test it against live cases. The mission is to make courtroom-grade forensics reachable for the people who do the work, not to gatekeep it. India first. The world follows.
— Recognised by BPR&D Ministry of Home Affairs IIT Kanpur · C3iHub NM-ICPS
— The founders
Two co-founders. One company.
Shubham Pandey
Co-founder · Chief Executive Officer
Heads the company's operations and engineering functions. Responsible for the engineering organisation, the software platform, day-to-day operations, and the Section 63(4)(c) certification discipline.
IIT Kanpur
Chakra is more than two co-founders.
A small team of engineers, researchers, and operators builds alongside us. Each role is chosen deliberately, against the standard the work itself sets. The team grows only where the next person makes the work stronger.
— The letter
From the founders.
We started Chakra because we watched Indian investigators struggle with foreign tools that were not built for Indian evidence law. The Section 65B certificate that had to be assembled after the fact, by hand, from logs and timestamps the foreign tool did not bother to preserve in the order the law required. The acquisition that was forensically sound but procedurally inadmissible because the chain of custody form was a screenshot pasted into a Word document. The cloud dependency that the institution could not approve. The licence server in another time zone.
We did not set out to build a vendor. We set out to fix the work. The product followed.
What we are committed to is the work that holds up in court. Not the work that looks good in a brochure. The Section 63(4)(c) certificate is born of the acquisition itself, signed and dated at the byte, because that is what the statute now expects. The dual-hash is on every byte because the integrity question has to be answerable in front of a bench that does not care about our reputation. The deployment is air-gapped because the institutions that use Chakra have decided, correctly, that institutional infrastructure stays inside the institutional perimeter.
The brand is Chakra. The legal entity is Cyber Chakra Technology Private Limited. We work from the DJAC building at IIT Kanpur, because the people doing the deepest Indian-context work on this problem are there. C3iHub supports the early work and continues to back the company. We expect to remain there.
The work is the point. The brand earns itself by the work.
Abhishek Waghmare and Shubham Pandey founders, Cyber Chakra Technology
— Where we are
DJAC, IIT Kanpur.
Chakra works from the DJAC building at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. The early work was supported by the Centre for Cyber-physical Systems Cybersecurity and Cybercrime Hub (C3iHub) at IIT Kanpur, which continues to back the company. Open in Maps →
Cyber Chakra Technology Private Limited
Registered office: Patna, Bihar, India.
Customer-facing correspondence: contact@cyberchakra.in.