Funding Opportunity for PETRAS Academics through CyberASAP

Cyber Security Academic Startup Accelerator Programme (CyberASAP) is a 2-phase competition looking to identify the most promising commercial opportunities arising from Cybersecurity research, with special provision for PETRAS work, past or present.

DCMS will work with Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, to invest up to £800,000 for projects worth up to £32,000. Please note that the current competition is for Phase 1, so the funding is for the initial 4 months of the programme.

Two funding streams will be made available for this competition – Strand 1 is for eligible researchers who have been funded from PETRAS as part of a research project. Strand 2 is the CyberASAP and is open for eligible individuals from academic institutions that are not eligible for the SDTaP commercialisation strand.

Key Dates: 

• Monday 7 February 2022: Competition opens
• Tuesday 8 February 2022: Online briefing event
• Thursday 17 February 2022: CyberASAP Demo Day*
• Wednesday 2 March 2022 11:00am: Competition closes
• Friday 11 March 2022: Applicants notified

*There is also an opportunity to see the TAIMAS team in action and see their Proof of Concept.

CyberASAP is the only pre-seed accelerator programme in the UK’s Cyber Security ecosystem. Launched in 2017, it is an initiative designed to encourage the commercialisation of UK academic research in cybersecurity.

The Programme is delivered by Innovate UK KTN and Innovate UK. The type of benefits you might expect to gain from this programme include:

• Starting on the road to commercialisation
• Commercial upskilling, enterprise training and development of academics (including sales, networking, communications, IP)
• Commercialisation including spinout, licensing and open source of products, goods and services
• Better understanding of how to engage and collaborate with industry
• In some cases, improvements to university processes and practices for commercialisation and IP management

“Taking part in the CyberASAP process has been fantastically valuable. Despite many years of managing R&D in industry, I learned a huge amount about marketing, selling and presenting to investors and clients. The speakers lined up for the excellent Bootcamp days were of top quality, and advice from venture capitalists invaluable.

CyberASAP provides the essential tools to take academic ideas into potential marketplaces, helping participants gain the insights needed to understand their products from the clients’ point of view. In addition to directly supporting the development of spin-out product or service opportunities, the value of the CyberASAP learning experience is sufficient reason in itself to justify participation.” Jeremy Watson CBE – TAIMAS CyberASAP Cohort 5 project

“CyberASAP has been extremely valuable in communicating the importance of finding the right product/market-fit, encouraging our team to take the time and energy for market validation, and in providing us with valuable feedback to carve out the unique selling points for our project.” Ivo Sluganovic, PhishAR/University of Oxford

If you’re an academic who’d like to apply to join CyberASAP 2022/23, you can find out more about the programme here and see the competition details here. The funding competition opens on 7 February and closes on 2 March 2022.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the PETRAS Centre Team at petras@ucl.ac.uk. For queries about programme specifics, please contact cyberasap@ktn-uk.org.