Vipul Ved Prakash

Topsy was a social media search and analytics service that was unparalleled in the breadth and level of insight it provided. We built an indexing system from the ground-up that indexed over a trillion social posts and was up-to-the-second real-time. Our customers included fortune 500s, movie studios, presidential campaigns, search engines, top news publications, among others. Raised $27M from top angels and VCs.

Topsy was acquired by Apple.

I co-founded Cloudmark with Jordan Ritter to commercialize Vipul's Razor technology and bring it to more platforms. Our products became instrumental in stemming the the tide of spam. Cloudmark filters over 20% of Internet's email today and increasing portion of world's SMS/messaging traffic.

Cloudmark was acquired by Proofpoint.

Vipul’s Razor is an open-source spam filter that works by aggregating spam reports from users, turning them into fingerprints and distributing them back for filtering. When I wrote it in 1999, Razor was one of the first systems with a practical implementation of ideas like crowdsourcing, reputations, consensus, and automatic, real-time filtering. It all worked surprisingly well and Vipul’s Razor was installed on 10+ million servers, packaged with most Linux & BSD systems.

It continues to be part of the standard email defense maintained by the Cloudmark team at Proofpoint.

Ported C/C++ code from Windows to Linux, wrote a build system for said code and worked on a fancy homomorphic version of RSA. I met some of the most talented engineers working in the silicon valley at Napster.

On contract, I created the first version of tradeindia.com, now India's largest B2B portal, back in the days when CGI was cutting-edge web technology. Among the "application suite" was a perl app that converted print version of TradeIndia's yellow pages (PageMaker files) into a database-backed web application.

Along with a few friends, I created Sense/Net, a virtual service that magically turned crappy "student" telnet accounts into glorious TCP/IP ones and provided privacy from snopping. It became a popular service with early Internet users in India.

I was a top-ranked junior Table Tennis player in India with over 25 gold medals in state and national championships. I played for FCI & Delhi, trained with Arjuna awardee Manmeet Singh and attended the 1996 Olympics Camp.