Kaspersky announces the 12 finalists for its latest Open Innovation Program

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Global cybersecurity company Kaspersky has announced the 12 finalists for its Kaspersky Open Innovation Program.

The program, held as part of Kaspersky’s Innovation Hub for startups, invited cybersecurity startups serving the small and medium-sized business sector to pitch their ideas for an opportunity to collaborate with Kaspersky.

It received nearly 200 applications, with startups from several countries in Europe and further afield including the Germany, France, the UK, US, Israel and others. This list was whittled down to the most promising startups. Twelve finalists were chosen after an online demo day on September 30 when applicants pitched the expert panel.

The finalists are addressing a wide array of challenges and issues in cybersecurity, whether they are developing artificial intelligence tools to detect malware or new processes for verifying people and processes.

• Blaick (Israel) – Cybersecurity startup that deploys proprietary AI threat detection tech for the early prevention of online cybercrime, including phishing, malware and scam.

• CyberCyte (UK) – Provides 360° protection for on-premise and off-premise users in minutes.

• Cyolo (Israel) – A safer architecture that allows organisations to securely connect their internal, remote and third-party users to their working environments.

• Haltdos (India) – An IT security company providing AI-based network and application security solutions both on-premise and on-cloud.

• InstaSafe (India) – A cloud-based Security-as-a-Service solution provider, delivering protection to mobile and remote workers, enabling them to securely access enterprise apps, email and web from anywhere on any network.

• Polaris Infosec (Singapore) – Providing a next-generation AI engine to monitor and analyse website and API traffic.

• Polymer (US) – Real-time detection and redaction of sensitive material such as PII, HIPAA-protected health information, and regulated financial information in popular collaboration tools like Slack, Zendesk, Zoom, Github and more.

• Pyxsoft PowerWAF (Chile) – Offering protection against DoS and OWASP top ten attacks, data theft, server infiltration, blocking of installed malware, and zero-day attacks.

• Safetica (Czech Republic) – This DLP suite combines data protection with behavioural analysis and endpoint monitoring.

• WEBGAP (US) – WEBGAP is a browser isolation cybersecurity startup, fully-hosted and fully-managed remote browsers.

• Zecurion Data Loss Prevention (Russia) – Offering comprehensive protection against the leakage of information throughout the course of its lifecycle — from creation and recording to archiving and deletion.

• Zero Networks (Israel) – Preventing attacks from spreading and causing damage by automatically restricting network access to only what is normally needed — everything else goes through two-step verification.

The program specialised in cybersecurity but with a specific focus on helping small and medium sized businesses, according to Andrey Nikonov, Startup Engagement Manager.

“We had a narrow request from business — a focus on cybersecurity solutions for SMB (small and medium-sized businesses) to protect cloud applications and the network,” he said. “As a result, with the support of scouts, we managed to collect an impressive funnel of startups and select truly deep-tech startups from various countries.”

Scouts, partners and expert jurors helped Kaspersky to identify the most promising startups out of all the applicants, including Russian venture market analytics platform Dsight, startup accelerator F6S, Israeli investment advisory firm Axis Innovation, and GoTech Innovation.

“Within the challenging timeframe, we successfully identified more than 2,500 highly-specialised deep-tech startups in around 10 countries all over the world,” Polina Yunda, Scouting Manager at Dsight said.

Companies chosen from the program will have the opportunity to collaborate with Kaspersky through the Kaspersky Innovation Hub by integrating their technologies into new and existing products from the cybersecurity giant.

Kaspersky Innovation Hub brings together startups from around the world to work on new solutions with Kaspersky through various programmes. It continues to look for interesting cybersecurity startups to become partners and collaborators. Startups can apply to the program here.