Manan Shah
Date of Birth: 19 August 1993
Place of Birth: Vadodara, Gujarat, India
Birth Sign: Leo
Height: 160 cm / 5 ft 3 in
Education: Shreemati H.S. Shah High School
Residence: Pune, Maharashtra, India
Nationality: Indian
Hair color: Dark brown
Eyes color: Brown
Occupation: Ethical Hacker, Author, Speaker, Entrepreneur
[Founder and CEO of Avalance Global Solutions an IT Security Company | Cyber Security Author, Tech Entrepreneur and Speaker]
Official website: mananshah.co | Avalance Global Solutions. https://avalance.in/|avalance.in

About
With over 9 years of experience in cybersecurity, I am part of Microsoft's top 100 security researchers in the world. Currently, I am the Founder, Director and Chief Executive Officer at Avalance Global Solutions with over 5 offices spread across India, Dubai, and the USA. Prior to Avalance, at the age of 21, I have had the opportunity to solve cybercrime cases for some of the biggest MNC's in the world, such as Twitter, Yahoo!, Facebook, Nokia, Blackberry, PayPal, Skype, Google, Apple, Microsoft to name a few.

In addition to running my company, I am also passionate about traveling, playing video games and also conducting webinars. I have also been invited as a speaker at platforms like TEDx and Infosec.

Biography
At the age of 15, when most of my friends were busy playing cricket or socializing, I was busy fixing computers for my neighbors and relatives as a hobby. I was a hardware expert who hated going to school and doing regular classwork. Honestly, I never had a penchant for the formal education structure in school. I was a proud backbencher who was often reprimanded by the school teachers for consistently failing in all my subjects. However, the only subject that I aced in class was computer science. I spent most of my childhood staying hooked to the PC watching online videos and learning about programming languages and hacking.

Things took a beautiful turn when I attended a seminar on ethical hacking at the MS University Vadodara back in the year 2009. The session helped me broaden my perspective and inspired me to work towards turning my passion for hacking into an ethical profession. Hence, I started focusing on building my skill set in ethical hacking and prepared myself by learning programming languages and intrusion prevention techniques online. In order to test my skills to test, I ended up working for the Cyber cell departments of various law enforcement agencies and few private firms and helped them fix their cybersecurity problems. With an aim to identify their cyber threats and tackle those vulnerabilities online. However, I never levied any fees for any of my work as I felt, I still needed to learn more.

Finally, in the year 2014, I stumbled upon an unusual cross-site scripting vulnerability on Go Daddy’s platform which later I helped resolve. The company even offered me a job but I wasn’t ready to accept a job. I wanted to still play the field to explore and learn more about various web vulnerabilities myself and as a hobby, I started participating in various bug bounty programs of Google, Facebook among others to test my skills. While this self-learning phase continued for a while, I was finally starting to take up freelance projects and slowly started working towards my vision to build my own brand and take it global. Soon after I registered Avalance Global Solutions with the help of a couple of friends, who believed in my vision and were willing to support me.

I think the biggest motivation for me would be that I am living my dream. This profession has been my passion, my hobby, my sense of escape into the beautiful world of programming and hacking. At the age of 21, I have succeeded in creating a global brand, Avalance, an online cybersecurity platform that serves clients across verticals, to help them resolve IT security risks.

Today, my company has an impressive pool of clientele, which includes the Dubai Police, Pepsico, ICICI Bank, Bank of Baroda, Godrej, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Reliance, Tata, Oyo, Swiggy, HUL and few Bollywood production houses among others.

My goal is to expand into new geographies and contribute towards improving cybersecurity systems globally.

Associated with:
Got Investment from Raj Kundra UK British businessman who is married to Shilpa Shetty, a Bollywood Actress.

Awards
2013 : reported Vulnerabilities in Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple, Microsoft etc and get into hall of fame..
2014 : Young Indian Innovator by Digit Magazine
2015 : The Indian Firewall by Govt. of Gujarat
2016 : Company of the Year in Cyber Security - Silicon India
2017 : 30 Entrepreneur of the Year : Avalance CEO by Silicon Review
2018 : Game changers of tomorrow: by Outlook India
2019 : Entrepreneur of the Year 2019 in AI (Entrepreneur India Magazine)
2019 : K7 Computing - Cyber Safe Award
2019 : The Economic Times Promising Brands
2020 : National Youth Day Awards
2020 : Accolades from Dubai Police (for helping in eCrime)
2020 : Technology Provider of the year by Entrepreneur India
2020 : InfoSec PG’s Startup of the Year in AI & Services
2020 : InfoSec PG’s Company of the Year in AI & Services
2020 : Gartner's Market Guide for SOC