Overview

Telivy was a San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup founded in 2021 by Naren Sathiya, Ben Grosser, and Venkata Vijay Ventrapragada. The company participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch and set out to automate cybersecurity risk assessments for small and medium-sized businesses, initially wrapping that capability inside an embedded cyber insurance distribution platform. It raised approximately $2.6M in total funding across its roughly three-and-a-half-year life.^[1]

Telivy failed to achieve independent scale because its original embedded-insurance wedge required too many partnership layers to generate revenue at SMB scale, and its subsequent pivot to MSP security tooling arrived too late and with too little capital to compete in a market rapidly consolidating around larger platform vendors.

On January 14, 2025, Cytracom — a McKinney, Texas-based MSP infrastructure software provider — acquired Telivy for undisclosed terms.^[2] CEO Naren Sathiya joined Cytracom to lead its new Security and Risk Management product category. The fates of co-founders Ben Grosser and Vijay Ventrapragada post-acquisition are unknown, and no financial terms were released — signals consistent with a modest exit.

Founding Story

Naren Sathiya's path to Telivy ran directly through Hippo Insurance. As an early engineer at Hippo, Sathiya built and led the company's embedded distribution channel — a program that placed homeowners insurance inside the workflows of homebuilders. That channel grew to represent more than 20% of Hippo's revenue within 18 months.^[3] The lesson Sathiya drew was specific: insurance is most effectively sold when it is embedded at the moment of a relevant transaction, not when a customer has to seek it out independently.

Before Hippo, Sathiya had co-founded a company called Trusu, though no public record of what Trusu built or why it ended is available.^[4] He studied Computer Science and Business Administration at UC Irvine — a combination that positioned him at the intersection of technical product development and commercial distribution, the exact skill set the Telivy thesis required.

The founding insight was a direct application of the Hippo playbook to a different insurance line. Cyber insurance for SMBs was a structurally underserved market: small businesses faced real and growing cyber risk, but the traditional broker channel was slow, paper-heavy, and designed for enterprise customers. Sathiya's bet was that an ML-based risk assessment platform, embedded inside SaaS tools and insurance agencies that SMBs already used, could unlock a distribution channel that legacy brokers could not replicate.

Ben Grosser joined as Co-Founder and Chief Insurance Officer, bringing insurance domain expertise to complement Sathiya's engineering and distribution background.^[5] Venkata Vijay Ventrapragada rounded out the founding team as a technical co-founder. The broader early team drew from Google, At-Bay (a cyber-native insurer), Hippo Insurance, Willis Towers Watson, IBM, and TikTok — a roster that covered insurance underwriting, security engineering, and machine learning.^[6]

The company was incorporated as Telivy, Inc. but also operated under the name SalusWall — a dual-brand structure that, in retrospect, may have signaled an early hedge toward pure security tooling even before the formal pivot.^[7]

Y Combinator accepted Telivy into its Summer 2021 batch, investing $125K on September 2, 2021.^[8] TechCrunch's Demo Day coverage captured the pitch in a single sentence: "SMBs need cyber insurance, and Telivy wants to give it to them." That framing — insurance-first, security-second — would not survive the company's first year intact.