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Proofpoint expands India operations with new AI Security Engineering Centre in Hyderabad. Hyderabad, India, August 19, 2026: Cybersecurity company Proofpoint, Inc. is significantly expanding its presence in India as organisations accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence and face growing challenges around data protection, AI security and privacy compliance. City & Local Guides The company has announced a new AI Security Engineering Centre of Excellence in Hyderabad, alongside plans to hire more than 200 engineers over the next 12 to 24 months. Proofpoint said the expansion will strengthen India's role in its global AI security and research and development strategy while helping organisations address emerging security risks associated with employees, AI systems and sensitive data. Proofpoint sees strong growth in India. Proofpoint's India business has tripled over the past 12 months, while new customer acquisition has grown at a double-digit rate. The company also reported that the number of seats protected by its security solutions has increased by more than 600% over the past 18 months. The cybersecurity company said recent customer wins include organisations across banking and financial services, business process outsourcing, defence and the public sector. The growth comes as companies increasingly look to protect sensitive information while deploying AI across business operations. According to Proofpoint's 2026 AI and Human Risk Landscape report, 87% of organisations globally have already deployed AI, while 52% of those organisations are not fully confident that they can detect a compromised AI system. New Hyderabad centre to focus on AI Security. The new Hyderabad AI Security Engineering Centre of Excellence will become part of Proofpoint's global R&D organisation. City & Local Guides The centre is expected to focus on technologies designed to secure AI applications, copilots and autonomous AI agents. Proofpoint also plans to expand its AI security roadmap through capabilities from its Acuvity portfolio, covering areas such as AI governance, runtime protection and AI application security. Discover more Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence Computer Science Computer Security The company plans to recruit more than 200 engineers for the Hyderabad centre over the next two years. Proofpoint CEO Sumit Dhawan said India's rapid AI adoption, changing threat landscape and evolving data-protection environment make the country an important market for the company's global AI security strategy. Proofpoint opens new Delhi office. Alongside the Hyderabad expansion, Proofpoint is also establishing a new office in Delhi. The company said the Delhi presence will strengthen its go-to-market capabilities and allow it to provide greater local support to customers and partners. Proofpoint will continue investing in: * Sales * Customer success * Technical support * Partner ecosystem development * Engineering * Product development The company's broader India operations include its established presence in Bengaluru and Pune. Data Security gains importance under India's DPDPA. The expansion comes as Indian businesses prepare for evolving requirements under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA). Proofpoint's latest Voice of the CISO research found that 99% of Indian CISOs surveyed reported material loss of sensitive data, compared with 66% globally. Discover more Geographic Reference South Asians & Diaspora Security Products & Services The company argues that the rapid adoption of AI is making data security more complex because employees and AI systems can create, access and share sensitive information across multiple environments. Organisations therefore need greater visibility into where sensitive data is stored, how it is being used and how it can be protected. Proofpoint expands unified Data Security capabilities. Proofpoint is positioning its unified data security platform to help Indian organisations manage these risks. Its capabilities include: * Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) * Data Loss Prevention * Adaptive Email DLP * Insider Threat Management The platform is designed to help organisations discover and classify sensitive information, prevent data loss and identify potentially risky behaviour. Proofpoint said connecting data sensitivity with user behaviour and threat intelligence can give security teams greater visibility into where risks are concentrated. The company also provides local data-centre support for Indian customers, aimed at addressing data sovereignty and compliance requirements. Proofpoint's India expansion at a glance. The company's latest expansion includes several major milestones: 3X - India business growth over the past year 200+ - Engineers planned for the new Hyderabad AI Security Engineering Centre 550+ - Extended team members at Proofpoint's Pune Centre of Excellence 600%+ - Increase in protected seats over the past 18 months 2 - New and expanded strategic locations across Hyderabad and Delhi, alongside existing operations India becomes a strategic AI Security hub. Proofpoint's investment reflects the growing importance of India in the global cybersecurity and artificial intelligence ecosystem. As businesses deploy AI at scale, security teams face a new challenge: protecting not only employees and traditional applications but also AI agents, sensitive data and automated workflows. For Proofpoint, the expansion of its Hyderabad engineering centre and Delhi operations signals a broader strategy to combine India's technology talent with the company's global AI security capabilities. The company expects its expanded Indian footprint to support both local customers and the development of technologies for its global markets. Ruchi Kumar is the associate editor at Entrepreneur News Network and TVW News India, where she leads editorial strategy, brand storytelling, and startup ecosystem coverage. With a strong focus on innovation, business, and marketing insights, he curates impactful narratives that spotlight India's evolving entrepreneurial landscape. She has written extensively on fintech, AI and emerging startups.

Proofpoint launches AI security engineering centre in India. The security supplier is hiring over 200 engineers in Hyderabad to develop models that can interpret the intent behind the actions of AI agents, Proofpoint's latest investment in a market where its business has tripled in a year. Published: 19 Aug 2026 16:45 Proofpoint has opened an artificial intelligence (AI) security engineering centre of excellence in Hyderabad, India, and plans to hire more than 200 engineers in the country over the next 12 to 24 months. The centre, the latest in a string of investments in the subcontinent by the email and data security supplier, will develop what the company calls intent-based models. These models work out what an AI agent is trying to do as it acts, rather than scanning code for flaws after the fact. "AI is acting like humans," Proofpoint CEO Sumit Dhawan said in an interview with Computer Weekly. "It responds to questions, queries and prompts by looking at all the information and, to some extent, applying intelligence, not logic. So, you need to make sure you understand the intent of all the actions the AI is taking." Proofpoint already runs intent models against human behaviour across email and endpoints, but those models do not transfer to machines, said Dhawan. And the work is never done, as agent communication protocols are rewritten within a matter of months as model providers add capabilities. The Hyderabad team will keep building new detection models as agents become more powerful, he added. Dhawan said the investment in the new centre is a strategic move in a country that has been an early adopter of AI. More boards in India also understand how AI expands the attack surface, giving security teams cover to adopt it safely. Plus, there is a local supply of engineers who have a mix of data modelling and security experience. "That intersection of skills, and the enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit in India, is what led us to decide to build a centre that could do intent-based models for AI security," he said. Proofpoint's India business has tripled over the past year, according to the company, with the number of seats it protects up by more than 600% over 18 months and new customer acquisition growing at double-digit rates. Recent wins span banking and financial services, business process outsourcing, defence, and the public sector. Training data. Much of the training data that is used to build the intent models comes from Proofpoint's telemetry and other data built up over time. The company handles 2.7 trillion enterprise messages, and the threats it removes aren't wasted. "We are the front door of filtering the garbage for the world in the enterprise, and all that garbage that we filter out is actually our proprietary IP [intellectual property]," said Dhawan. The detected threats are fed back into training the models to recognise attempts to prompt-engineer legitimate AI agents. The training data also comes from endpoint agents that Proofpoint deploys for data loss prevention (DLP), which record how employees handle sensitive files, including what they feed into copilots and chatbots. That gives the models a baseline of normal behaviour against which to hunt for the abnormal. The models themselves are kept deliberately small. "We start with a large open model, but we shrink it, so our models cannot write Shakespeare, but they can certainly detect what's bad communication or bad intent," said Dhawan. Smaller models are also cheaper to run, and the savings are passed on to customers, he said. However, Dhawan did not claim that Proofpoint's models can detect all threats. "No model is deterministic," he said. "Anyone who says they are going to have 100% efficacy is simply lying." Dhawan said Proofpoint uses triage agents that filter the alert stream with up to 98% accuracy, cutting the false alerts that could otherwise overwhelm security teams. The agents then present human analysts with a list of findings, sometimes including the recommended configuration changes. The agents can operate on their own, but most customers want a human to sign off on remediation actions, he added. Reachability, access and intent. Amid growing concerns over AI-mediated attacks, Dhawan said chief information security officers (CISOs) do not need to tear up their security playbooks, but chasing vulnerability counts is a losing game. That's because each new generation of models will expose new flaws faster than security teams can patch them, and attackers can deploy malicious agents to exploit the gap between disclosures and fixes. Instead, he suggested CISOs focus on three areas, the first being reachability: "94% of the way malicious stuff reaches the enterprise is through the human layer, and now the agent layer," he said. "Get your communications that are exploited through social engineering and prompt engineering as tight as possible." Second, CISOs should pair access with intent, knowing what every identity - human or machine - can touch and whether it is using that access as it should. Third, they should reduce the number of touchpoints before code ships to harden the path from code to production. Proofpoint doesn't sell into that last one, but Dhawan pushed it anyway as "the crux of the problem" of agentic vulnerabilities. Enterprises can expect to deploy agents from suppliers like Databricks, SAP and Salesforce, as well as those built in-house. Proofpoint integrates with the major platforms via application programming interfaces and catches everything else at the endpoint, browser, network and model context protocol (MCP) layers. "Complexity can be your friend as long as it can be operated in a fashion that's simpler," said Dhawan. An investment region. Proofpoint's Asia-Pacific business is growing at about double the company rate, which Dhawan put in the low teens, and he said the firm is investing in the region at more than twice that pace, with Japan, ASEAN and India all in build-out mode. Just two years ago, Proofpoint had no one on the ground in India. Now, it has close to 100 employees, while the partner base has gone from a single transacting distributor to about a dozen partners running proofs of concept. The other job is shedding the email-only label. Proofpoint's global data and AI security business is growing at more than 20%, and the company claims that over 60% of the Fortune 50 use its data security products. It has also been named a Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice for DLP, a distinction drawn from verified user reviews rather than analyst rankings. Posture management and AI security are now integrated into the same endpoint agent and console that its DLP customers already run. "No one in this market offers that," said Dhawan. On a potential stock market listing, Dhawan noted that cyber security equities "are trading quite well" and that a listing remains on the cards when conditions suit - though he said it's not a necessity and there's nothing forcing the company to go public. The Hyderabad centre joins a Pune site with more than 550 extended team members working across engineering, product development and support, a local datacentre that has served Indian customers since the third quarter of 2025, and go-to-market hubs in Delhi and Bangalore, with a new Delhi office on the way. While in India, Dhawan spent time with about 30 CISOs in the country. "The happy customers we brought in in just the last 12 months, each of them endorsing us to others that were not yet customers, give me even more confidence as I walk out of the region," he said. * Kaspersky researcher Sojun Ryu says ransomware crews have joined nation-state groups in going after South Korean organisations, as traces of LLM output start turning up inside malware. * Unauthorised access to a development and testing environment managed by IBM has exposed the names, NRIC numbers and property addresses of about 70,000 people held by the Singapore Land Authority. * Japan's Nikkei has confirmed a major data breach that potentially exposed the personal information of more than 17,000 employees and business partners after hackers infiltrated its internal Slack messaging platform. * Australian privacy commissioner warns that the human factor is a growing threat as notifications caused by staff mistakes rose significantly even as total breaches declined 10% from a record high.