Funding Competition: Cyber Security Academic Startup Accelerator Programme (Phase 1) – UK

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) will work with Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, to invest in innovative on cyber security projects coming from an academic research base.

The aim of this competition is to identify the most promising commercial opportunities. Your proposal must include the area of your research, the problem that you are solving and your proposed solution.

The Cyber Security Academic Startup Accelerator Programme (CyberASAP) is a one year programme.

Project Size

• Your project’s total costs must be up to £32,000 with £16,000 allocated to stage 1 and £16,000 to stage 2.

Projects they will not fund

They are not funding projects:

• that are not related to cyber security
• that are defence-focused
• from academic institutions outside the UK
• that have no intention to commercialise
• that have an academic lead that has already led and completed a previous CyberASAP project
• which are classed as State aid under EC regulations or a subsidy under the EU-UK TCA
• with undertakings which gain a selective economic or commercial advantage from the funding

Who can apply?

• This award is provided on a no subsidy basis. This means you must publish or make all project outputs openly available on a non-selective basis. If you decide to commercially exploit project outputs, you can only do so with no selective advantage.
• This competition offers two funding strands:
  • Strand 1: Industry Challenge-led strand
  • Strand 2: Open strand
• You will be asked which funding strand you are applying for:
  • Industry Challenge – led strand is open for eligible individuals from any UK academic institution who address one of three key industry challenge areas from AI model security, software supply chain security and Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) or Operation Technology (OT) security
• Open strand is open for any eligible individual
• Your project
  • Your project must:
    • start on 1 April 2024
    • end on 31 July 2024
  • You must only include eligible project costs in your application.
  • Under current restrictions, this competition will not fund any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any Russian or Belarusian entity as lead, partner or subcontractor. This includes any goods or services originating from a Russian or Belarusian source.
• Lead organisation
  • To be eligible for funding you must:
    • be based in a UK academic institution
    • have a cyber-security idea
    • be interested in the commercialisation of your idea
    • have the support of your academic institution’s technology transfer office, or equivalent
    • not act in any way to gain selective commercial or economic advantage from the outputs of this project
• Project team
  • To collaborate with the lead, you must:
    • be based in a UK academic institution
    • be interested in the commercialisation of the idea
    • have the support of your academic institution’s technology transfer office, or equivalent
  • Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service (IFS) by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once accepted, partners will be asked to login or to create an account and enter their own project costs into IFS.
  • To be an eligible collaboration, the lead and at least one other organisation must apply for funding when entering their costs into the application.
  • All individuals based in a UK academic institution are eligible, including but not limited to early career researchers and senior academic researchers.
• Subcontractors
  • Subcontractors are not allowed in this competition.

For more information, visit Innovate UK.