NCSC inducts six security startups to Cyber Accelerator

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has named six innovative security startups to a new round of its 10-week Cyber Accelerator programme, offering expert technical advice and the opportunity to pitch their technology to potential investors.

Run with support from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and Wayra, Telefónica’s innovation arm, the Cyber Accelerator has already mentored 30 startups across five other cohorts, under the auspices of the £1.9bn National Cyber Security Strategy.

Chris Ensor, NCSC deputy director for growth, said: “The Cyber Accelerator programme has been a great success, and previous companies involved have brought new ideas to the market.

“The aim of the programme is to support those with pioneering ideas which in turn, encourages jobs and market growth.

“Together we believe we can provide new and novel solutions to the UK’s cyber security challenges,” he added.

Based in Cheltenham, the programme also provides benefits designed to help scale up all aspects of a young tech business, including funding and office space.

Previous cohorts have, between them, raised around £35m in private funding for their projects, and pre-pandemic, a number of participants travelled to the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

The six companies named to the latest intake are:

• Angoka, a developer of security products to address risk in machine-to-machine (M2M) or internet of things (IoT) environments, including smart home technology and future autonomous vehicles;
• IDEE, a scaling startup with truly use-case agnostic passwordless authentication and authorisation SaaS offerings built on a zero-knowledge architecture;
• Insurtechnix, developer of the CyberSentinel protection platform for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs);
• Naq Cyber, which has developed an ‘all-in-one’ security compliance, documentation, emergency response, monitoring and training service, again pitched at small businesses;
• RapidSpike, whose service detects client-side data breaches, improves website performance and monitors critical customer interactions;
• And Simple Cyber Life, a consumer service designed to help keep families safe online, addressing problems such as hijacked social media accounts, cyber bullying, online grooming, and scams and fraud.