A call for applications has been made by an incubator program providing engineering resources.
CSIT Labs, based at Queen’s University Belfast’s Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT), have to date “graduated” five teams from the first effort, including B-Secur, CyberLytic, Liopa, Sirona Technologies and Cognition Video. In the second program, teams will partake in a nine month managed incubator program which provides up to three man-months of funded engineering development resource, representing a £30,000 value to companies.
Louise Cushnahan, Innovation Programmes Manager at CSIT Labs, said: “Given the challenge that start-ups have in accessing technical talent, we believe that CSIT Labs is a truly unique incubator program for cybersecurity. We already have teams from across the UK expressing interest in applying for Cohort 2 and look forward to growing the pool of indigenous UK cybersecurity companies.”
David Crozier, CSIT’s head of strategic partnerships and engagement told Infosecurity that the three man-months of engineering development resource is given to each team in the cohort for free, and no equity or ownership of any foreground IP developed by CSIT’s engineers is taken or retained. “No other incubator offers that,” Crozier said. “That’s worth about £30k which means the companies don’t need to secure investment to fund that. It also means that start-ups can get technology to a more demonstrable state to help secure customers or investment.
“Our pool of 16 industrially experienced engineers includes expertise spanning crypto hardware and software, biometrics, authentication, deep learning, data analytics, machine learning, AI, SDN, SCADA etc.”
Participants will only be required to attend (in person) a minimum of two engineering meetings, three workshops and the final CSIT Labs Demo day in Belfast during the program timeframe. Applicants from UK Academia, government agencies and start-ups that have an incorporated company must by date of application: have been incorporated no more than five years ago; have no more than ten employees; and have secured no more than £500k investment. Each cohort is fixed to nine months and graduation is on demo day in September 2017.
Companies can apply now: https://www.csitlabs.com/apply/ and applications close 9 January 2017.