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Blooming Great: The Birth of Cyan Forensics
Our research has supported four amazing spin-outs: Zonefox (acquired by Fortinet), Symphonic (acquired by Ping), Cyan Forensics and Memcrypt. Each of the spin-outs looked at fundamental research work, and which was then used to build a core business case. It is thus important to understand the route that research takes, and how it can be turned into a high-impact spin-out.
For Cyan Forensics, a core part of the success of the spin-out has been in the creation of the core IP (though the PhD work of Phil Penrose), the translation of this work into a law enforcement domain (though Bruce Ramsay — who had previously worked as a forensics investigator in Police Scotland) and the translation of the research into a business context (through people like Ian Stevenson and Bruce Ramsay). Along the way, the support of Scottish Enterprise was key in translating the work from a research domain into a commercial one. The company is now scaling on an international basis, and could possibly be the next tech unicorn in Scotland [here]:
In this article, I will thus outline the patent submitted in 2017 and published in 2018 and which has since become part of the core innovation with the company…
