6.2023-London-Intro-Gradient

MARIE-TERESA VANDER SANDE: So I'm Marie-Teresa Vander Sande, Program Director at MIT Office of Corporate Relations. And I'm a program director in the industrial liaison side of things. But I'm going to talk to you today about the Startup Exchange.

And I'll give a brief introduction to that. Then we'll introduce our MIT startups who are here today. Then I'll turn it over to BT's Lisa Perkins, who will talk about Adastral Park and how they work with startups. And then she'll introduce a couple of UK startups.

One thing I want to do, though, is we have several startups. And rather than my popping up every time to say, and this is gradient, I'm going to introduce the first one, and then I'll tell you the order. And you just come up yourselves and introduce yourself. I think it's more efficient than jumping up.

So MIT Startup Exchange was begun within corporate relations about eight years ago. And it actually came out of a strategic planning exercise, where we realized that Industrial Liaison Program, of course, was working with big corporates and some other groups to help them develop a relationship at MIT.

But the corporates were telling us they wanted to work with MIT startups as well. And there were a lot more startups coming out of MIT. So we formed what we call the MIT Startup Exchange.

And the objectives of the Startup Exchange are to foster collaborations between MIT-connected startups and ILP members. The Industrial Liaison Program's mission is to foster collaboration between corporates and MIT groups. So this is a nice synergy here.

So what do we mean by MIT-connected startups? There are three ways they can be connected. It can be the founding team or a faculty member, a staff member, a postdoc, a student, an alum. The second way they can be considered an MIT-connected startup is that they are founded with technology that's licensed from MIT.

And the third way is that although they weren't born at MIT, they've been recommended and vetted by various groups at MIT. So for example, The Engine, or CSAIL, or MIT.nano.

We work with about 1,000 startups. And they tend to be at the pilot stage or beyond. They come from all over the world, just like our corporates come from all over the world in virtually every sector. They tend to be more B2B than B2C.

And a specialized group of our startups we call STEX25. And these are companies that have been referred to us, or actually recommended, nominated by various labs on campus as being those that are especially market-ready. And for those startups in the STEX25, there are 25 of them a year.

And actually, I think that all of the startups that we're featuring today are either current or past STEX25 members. What we do with them is the value we provide is we expose them to industry all over the world, namely our corporate members, that we give them opportunities to speak at events, this one away from MIT, but many on campus.

And in fact, virtually every one of our conferences now that we produce has a session where MIT-connected startups are featured. If it's a themed event, then the startups follow that theme. We provide them with opportunities to connect with corporates in a very specific way.

This is originated on the part of the corporate asking to meet a startup in a particular technology area or maybe they're looking for a speaker at a conference. And we put together what we call an opportunity brief. Essentially it's like a request for proposal.

The startups respond to that. We curate those responses and make the introductions, one-to-one meetings with our corporate members. These are the curated one-on-one meetings. Although we didn't start out developing training sessions, these have evolved. And our team within MIT Startup Exchange does provide some training.

All of the presentations given today, they've been given directions. These are five-minute presentations. And this has come out of our group wanting to train. Success stories are many.

Some of our startups, the connections we help them make evolve into a deep research collaborations, pilot projects, even up to acquisitions. So I'm going to give you the order of presentations for our MIT folks.

And so I'd like you to remember this, not the audience. I'm talking about the startups. So we're going to start with George Harper from Gradient, followed by Truss Point, followed by IQ3 Connect, followed by Clara [INAUDIBLE], and then [? Mobilis. ?]

GEORGE HARPER: Thank you, Marie. Good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity to introduce Gradient. We're a cybersecurity company based in Boston. Our focus is on eliminating the risk of credential-based cyber attacks.

We also greatly simplify the security experience for end users and system administrators alike. We've got strong ties to MIT. Among team members that are MIT alums is our founder and CEO, a serial entrepreneur, and our COO, a cybersecurity expert. We also within the community include a corporate advisor and a professor out of MIT CSAIL.

Just this last year the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council awarded us with cybersecurity technology of the year, beating out companies like Akamai, Cyberark, and Netscout. Credential theft is the number one cause of cyber breach. Nearly every major attack over the last 10 years has involved credential theft.

And experts expect that to get worse. The problem is that user and system credentials-- I'm talking here about passwords, usernames, digital credentials-- are too easily stolen to compromise identity and then be able to obtain access and privilege. The predominant technologies that are out there today to protect companies really revolve around detection and response approaches.

And the challenge there is that they don't address the root causes of credential theft. And they operate too late in the attack cycle. So IBM security has found even with these solutions in place that the average time to detect and contain a breach is over nine months. We think it's really time for a fundamentally new approach to protecting these vulnerable credentials that provide and gate our access to online sensitive resources.

And enter our solution, Gradient Cybersecurity Mesh. By deploying our software agent to the computer endpoints you use every day or devices that are out doing IoT, we rotate your digital credentials frequently and seamlessly. We also anchor them to your devices, so that they become useless if stolen.

We continually monitor and attest to the trustworthiness of your devices from silicon to OS. We have a lot of backend infrastructure. We protect that against nation state attacks with secure enclave processors of our own design. And for devices that take our crypto-agile bootloader, we can securely and remotely upgrade the cipher suites and cipher identities for post-quantum resilience.

Once in place, Gradient Cybersecurity Mesh enables users to access and authenticate to the applications and infrastructure to which they're authorized, but without any passwords, without the hassle of multi-factor authentication, just simple, fast access with leading-edge security.

Our platform delivers true zero trust across three applications. One is enterprise zero trust access. Second is cloud security. And the third is critical infrastructure protection for applications like OT and IoT. It's protected with a very deep moat of intellectual property. At this point, we've had over 24 patents issued. We have over 50 additional ones pending.

Quick example, a case study, the goal of a large bank was to ensure that only legitimate users can access their services, but only from their trusted devices and do this in a seamless, easy fashion in order to avoid these credential-based attacks, no more account takeovers. If you're worried about the challenges of credential-based attacks, hate using passwords, the pain of multi-factor authentication, we'd love to talk to your teams, your technologists, your IT leaders about their challenges, problems, and our solutions. Thank you very much.