The Growing Market of Safe Tech … A Market That The UK Plays a Leading Role

The Internet is possibly the greatest “invention” in the history of humankind. It brings such benefits, but it also brings a whole lot of…

The Growing Market of Safe Tech

A Market That The UK Plays a Leading Role

The Internet is possibly the greatest “invention” in the history of humankind. It brings such benefits, but it also brings a whole lot of new ways to perform criminal activities. These days, robbers do not wear strippy jumpers and black masks to rob banks but will more typically spear phish elderly people for their banking details. Criminals, these days, can steal someone’s pension; they can create content which can cause harm; and send abuse, with little chance of ever being caught. If someone abuses you in the street, they are likely to get caught, but if someone does it online, they have a good chance of getting away with it.

The Internet is both a blessing and our worst nightmare. But, there is one area of the economy would aims to stand against the bad side of the Internet: Safe Tech.

For us, our third Cybersecurity spin-out (Cyacomb) is leading the way and has translated core research into products which can scale the world. Now, a new report (“International State of Safety Tech 2023”) outlines the growth in the sector. [here]. For this, the report defines that “security in the cyber age, [is] a $4.6 trillion market opportunity”. The four main sectors in “Safe Tech” are defined as:

  • Generation: Companies who create privacy-aware products, and which have embedded trust within their design.
  • Provenance: Companies who protect content, such as for trademarking and copyrights.
  • Curation: Companies which focus on trusted sharing within a trusted platform.
  • Investigation: Companies which involve investigations of malicious/crimimal activies.

What is safe tech?

An overview of how cybersafety integrates with cybersecurity is outlined in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Cybersecurity and cybersafey [1]

Overall, the US and UK seem to dominate in this market, with the UK having 165 providers (Figure 2). In the UK, this is led by companies such as Yoti, SuperAwesome and Crisp.

Figure 2

For market segments, the platform level and age-oriented professional services have the most companies [1]:

Figure 3 [1]

And, while investment in technology, there seems to be an uplift in investment in safe tech companies over 2023:

Figure 4 [1]

For this, system-wide governance and cyber-physical protection sees to have gained the majority of the funding:

Figure 5 [1]

Much of this investment has been in companies based in the US, Canada and the UK:

Figure 6 [1]

The risks of AI

For risks, the rise of Generative AI (GenAI) tools now poses new risk factors for Safety Tech, as AI is being increasingly used to generate harmful material. There is, though, a rise in the detection methods used, including for the detection of deep fakes, age estimation and content classification and labelling (Figure 7).

Figure 7[1]

And, we are so proud of our spin-out, and in the investment community in Scotland/UK:

Conclusions

Safe tech is here to stay, and there are many opportunities in the sector, especially in using AI to provide protection and classification. But there is also a risk from the usage of AI to generate harmful content, and thus there is space for new products and services in this space.

Finally, I leave it to Ian Stevenson, to outline how the Online Safety Act has the potential to enhance the protection of our citizens:

References

[1] “International State of Safety Tech 2023”, https://view.publitas.com/public-1/international-state-of-safety-tech-report-2023/page/1