Deadline: 19-Apr-23
Individuals based in a UK academic institution can apply for a share of up to £800,000 to join the cyber security academic startup accelerator programme 2023-2024 (CyberASAP).
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) will work with Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, to invest up to £800,000 in innovative cyber security projects coming from an academic research base.
The aim of this competition is to identify the most promising commercial opportunities in academia in respect to cyber security. 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 1-year programme. This is phase 1 of a 2-phase competition. Phase 1 will last up to 4 months, split into 2 stages:
- Stage 1: An initial 2 months for value proposition development activities, followed by a presentation to an independent judging panel who will select teams to go to stage 2
- Stage 2: A further 2 months for market validation activities
Funding Information
- Your project’s total costs must be up to £32,000 with up to £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
Eligibility Criteria
- 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:
- You will be asked which funding strand you are applying for:
- The Security of Digital Technologies at the Periphery (SDTaP) – commercialisation strand is open to eligible researchers from academic institutions that are active consortium members of the Privacy, Ethics, Trust, Reliability, Acceptability and Security (PETRAS). Eligible researchers are those who have been funded from PETRAS as part of a research project. This strand offers commercialisation support for UKRI-funded project-based research results with promising innovation potential and societal impact. Applicable projects extend across the PETRAS current project portfolio as well as the legacy project portfolio of the PETRAS IoT Research Hub.
- Open strand is open for eligible individuals from academic institutions that are not eligible for the SDTaP – commercialisation strand.
- You will be asked which funding strand you are applying for:
- Your project
- Your project must:
- have total costs for the two stages up to £32,000
- have total costs for the first stage up to £16,000
- have total costs for the second stage up to £16,000
- start on 9 May 2023
- end on 8 September 2023
- Your project must:
- 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 commercialization 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
- To be eligible for funding you must:
- 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 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 the Innovation Funding Service.
- 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.
- The grant will be paid to the academic institutions after each stage of phase 1. Each academic institution in the consortium will be funded individually, but the total funding for all academic partners must be no more than £32,000 for each application.
- To collaborate with the lead, you must:
- Subcontractors
- Subcontractors are not allowed in this phase of the competition.
- Building value proposition and market validation activities
- Participants in phase 1 with ideas that demonstrate the most potential for commercialisation will be invited to apply to participate in phase 2, where funding is available to develop a proof of concept for the product or service.
- Number of applications
- You can submit more than one application if you have multiple ideas, but they will not select more than one for funding.
For more information, visit Innovate UK.