Swisscom awards five cybersecurity startups

The current wave of cyber-attacks on large and small organisations is a major threat for businesses and thus calls for robust IT security solutions. The ninth edition of the Swisscom Startup Challenge launched a global call for startups in cybersecurity and over 80 global start-ups and research teams applied. Ten finalists made it to the next round and now, the jury has selected five winners that demonstrated the best ideas and a convincing business model.

The five winners are

CAOS (Switzerland) – Managing multiple identities within modern IT systems for a single person is expensive, inefficient and often insecure. St. Gallen based start-up CAOS developed a solution for managing identities, providing secure user authentication, and integrating customer use cases on top.

Code Intelligence (Germany) – Offers a CI/CD-agnostic platform for automated software security testing. The platform helps developers to protect themselves against unexpected edge cases. It empowers them to fix bugs during development and to achieve reproducible testing results. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Bonn, Code Intelligence supports leading companies such as Bosch, Deutsche Börse and Deutsche Telekom.

CYSEC (Switzerland) – Based at the EPFL Innovation Park, Lausanne, and with roughly 25 employees, Cysec provides the solution ARCA Trusted OS, a software-based solution for protecting containerized platforms, applications and workloads. ARCA protects highly sensitive data and workloads deployed on prem, in the cloud or in embedded platforms. Our ambition is to become the leading European provider of Confidential Computing by 2025.

Grip Security (Israel) – The Israeli start-up Grip offers a new approach to SaaS security, enabling organizations to discover nearly 100% of the SaaS applications used (known and unknown), govern, monitor and secure employee access and usage from any device and any location, and prevent data loss. 

Xorlab (Switzerland) – Provides specialized, machine-intelligent defence against highly engineered, sophisticated and targeted e-mail attacks. Founded in 2015 and spun out of ETH’s Laboratory of Software Technology, xorlab has grown to a team of 16 dedicated security professionals and passionate software engineers.

One-week exploration program
The winners will benefit from a one-week exploration programme with Swisscom’s cyber security community, which will help them broaden their network with mentors, potential partners and customers. One of the five start-ups will spend a week at the Swisscom Outpost in Silicon Valley.

(Press release/RAN)