Our Little Spin-out is All Grown Up
Our Little Spin-out is All Grown Up
“Cyacomb is at the forefront of tech development in Scotland”
Our third cybersecurity spin-out (Cyacomb) has just received £6.5 million in new investment [here]:
At the current times, investment in tech spin-outs and start-ups is challenging, but Cyacomb is leading the way in the safe tech marketplace. Generally, Cyacomb is following a similar path in grow and investment to Zonefox and Symphonic (both of which were eventually acquired for a significant valuation — of which the university reinvested a good part of its returns back into core research).
And, so, some of us might disagree about the usefulness of the patenting system, but the importance of patents in protecting IP has been so important in the journey of our spin-outs, and Cyacomb now has a patent for the World (pending), US (granted), GB (granted), EU (pending) and Canada (pending) here. Personally, I advise anyone thinking about creating a high-impact spin-out to protect their IP in as many regions of the world as possible.
My own university is generally highly supportive of protecting IP, but there needs to be a strong business case for creating something that will have long-term benefits to our research and impact — patents for the sake of it or just for esteem are probably not worth it. Patents can be costly to create and protect, but they can pay back 1,000s of times more.
What is nice, is there is some great comments on the investment:
“It’s inspiring to support companies like Cyacomb in being able to grow and develop their product to take it further into new, global markets.”
“Cyacomb is at the forefront of tech development in Scotland. They perfectly align with our mission to harness innovation.”
And with True Deploy and Lasting Asset looking to spin-out from Edinburgh Napier University in 2024, things are looking great in the creation of high impact spin-outs — and continue our Top 10 position for spin-outs in the UK, and where we received a perfect 4* assessment in REF 2021 for all our research impact case studies.
Overall, there is so much support around in Scotland, and we have the opportunity of attracting the best talent around to the city.
And, so, no one can ever take away your successes, and failure is just part of the learning process towards eventual success. And innovation is
“… a journey, a collaborative problem-solving process, where discoveries happen through a process of trial and error, false starts, and even mistakes. The process can be exhilarating. But as many of us know all too well, it can also be downright scary” — Linda Hill
The best innovation often equals research added to inventive steps and enterprise — and matched to a core vision and a mission to succeed. It should be remembered that Larry Page created the “PageRank” method at Stanford, and which was the invention that led to Google — and where one little inventive step has changed our world so much.
Go change the world …