MACH37 opens at Center for Innovative Technology in Herndon

Virginia Tech and the Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) announced a new partnership Thursday during the opening of MACH37, a Northern Virginia-based cybersecurity accelerator.

The organizations will develop a virtualized test environment housed in the Hume Center at Virginia Tech’s Research Center in Arlington. The goal is to open the cyber test range by next fall for use by companies entering the MACH37 program and university research projects.  Access to the test facility will be network enabled to allow testers to remain at their company location.

MACH37 is designed to facilitate the creation of cybersecurity companies in the commonwealth.  The Virginia General Assembly appropriated CIT $2.5 million to start and operate the accelerator.

The accelerator consists of two 90-day sessions per year.  Participants receive an initial company investment from the CIT GAP Fund upon acceptance to the program, and at the end, companies make “Demo Day” presentations to investors.  If they are successful, they receive a second investment from the CIT GAP Fund and private investors. MACH37 also offers a network of hundreds of cybersecurity experts to help the startups. 

            A list of MACH37’s inaugural class is below:

            •         Cypherpath, Herndon – Cypherpath brings a new generation of services built around its virtual cyber test range and virtual cloud, which provides teams with the ability to create, modify, view and control virtualized environments independently and collaboratively.  This new generation of technology increases the ability of chief information security officer’s to train, exercise, test, model and simulate through on demand replication of cyber infrastructure.  Cypherpath provides the only on demand platform for realistic cyber-experiences.

•         Key Cybersecurity Inc. Dumfries – Key Cybersecurity brings over 60 years of combined strategic thought leadership in cyber forensics to the security threat market. CyberMerlin, Key’s flagship product, employs algorithms and forensics investigative technologies that patrol enterprise environments and report abusive behavior, providing a proactive system that enhances network security.

•         Pierce Global Threat Intelligence, Dunn Loring – Pierce creates tailored and automated threat analysis based on each company’s individual enterprise network, ecosystem traffic and flow data. The data is then filtered and prioritized based on the individual company ecosystem, giving companies the ability to react to threats with a greater level of confidence.

•         CyberLingua, Tyson’s Corner – CyberLingua uses technologies developed over decades in the U.S. intelligence community to identify zero-day threats before they can cause damage.  Instead of manually tracking logs or anomalies, analysts will now be able to identify and synthesize patterns and weak signals in cyber-data and their associated combinations of risks underlying advanced persistent zero-day threats.

•         Sikernes, Bozeman, Mt. – Silkernes provides a Cybersecurity Analytics Platform (CAP) for organizations to analyze and understand the effectiveness and efficacy of cybersecurity expenditures.  Using predictive analytics, and leveraging “big data,” the Sikernes platform fills organizational gaps and gives organizations quantitative information to control security budget planning, security execution, and resource allocation thus promoting organizational transparency while maximizing security strategy ROI.