The program involved teams working remotely, with progress tracked on a weekly basis by cybersecurity experts
Kaspersky Lab named the winners of its inaugural Security Startup Challenge, selected at a grand final event at MIT, USA on 13 August. The prizes for the most promising startups were awarded to: Excalibur from Slovakia (1st place), Pipe from Germany (2nd place), Cyber DriveWare from Israel and ZeroDB from the USA who shared the 3rd place. Each team was awarded a share of an $80,000 prize fund as well as post-program support for the first prize.
Eugene Kaspersky, chairman and CEO of Kaspersky Lab, said: “As the number and sophistication of cyberthreats are evolving significantly from year to year, we decided to encourage young entrepreneurs from all over the world to build their own cybersecurity solutions or develop security features in their projects. We are proud of our security expertise and happy to share it with promising technology startups to make the world safer together. Having held the Security Startup Challenge for the first time, we were pleased to see so many talented startup founders making impressive improvements to their projects during the acceleration program. My congratulations to all finalists, and wishing you the best of luck out in the big business world.”
The Security Startup Challenge (SSC) 2015 is a global acceleration program developed and implemented by Kaspersky Lab in partnership with Mangrove Capital Partners and the ABRT Venture Fund. The three-month mentor-driven accelerator provided founders of 23 startup projects in cybersecurity and related areas, such as fintech, healthcare, mobile, the Internet of Things, and the Cloud, with business, cybersecurity and cross-industry expertise.
During SSC 2015, participants had a chance to explore the hottest trends in cybersecurity, create an action plan for the development of their projects, attract early adopters and customers, collect and analyze real market feedback data, improve products, analyze the competition and plan startup financing.
The program involved teams working remotely, with progress tracked on a weekly basis by cybersecurity experts and startup mentors who included experienced entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, as well as two bootcamps hosted at PwCin Luxembourg. PwC Luxembourg’s cybersecurity team contributed additional expertise to SSC 2015, and the bootcamps provided participants with a great opportunity to exchange views with their peers and understand the latest security challenges.
