STARTUPS & ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Technology

Complex AI systems are inherently black-boxes with minimal insight into their internal functionality. This bears the danger of decisions that are not justifiable, legitimate, robust against external manipulations or that simply cannot be understood by stakeholders with different backgrounds. To help organizations meet this challenge, QuantPi developed an innovative framework which systematically matches questions about the functionality of AI systems with appropriate algorithms to produce relevant explanations. Furthermore, it allows users to understand how the latter algorithms work and to evaluate risks when interpreting their output.

Scientific Background

QuantPi is a spin-off of the prestigious Helmholtz Center for Information Security (CISPA), located in Germany. We develop automated and scalable solutions for explainability and robustness auditing of AI models. The QuantPi team is made up of leading researchers, engineers and business minds from premier universities around the world. Our customers include well-established companies of various industries and fastly-growing AI startups.

Technology

Many companies are unaware of the attack surface they present to cybercriminals. The St. Ingbert-based company AIS wants to change that and helps companies uncover digital vulnerabilities and take appropriate security measures. The CISPA spin-off has developed the Findalyze platform, which enables companies to continuously monitor their Internet-exposed IT infrastructure and thus proactively secure it. Through the "attacker's goggles," the software examines publicly available information from companies for potentially security-relevant aspects, evaluates them, and provides actionable insights to improve and maintain IT security posture.

Scientific Background

To determine and reduce the potential attack surface, Findalyze applies various security-related checks and testing procedures to enterprise IT assets, such as domains, email addresses, or externally visible technologies. Under the technical and conceptual leadership of Dr. Oliver Schranz and Dr. Milivoj Simeonovski, both of whom earned their doctorates at CISPA, a scanning and evaluation mechanism was developed that processes the results for companies and makes them available on a dashboard. Through permanent knowledge transfer, AIS ensures that the latest findings and attack vectors are also incorporated into the platform.

Technology

The weakness sequire technology discovered in 2023 in large language models (LLMs) is in the way this technology works. This means that it cannot be
simply "turned off". There is no simple, monocausal approach to fixing the problem. Instead, a mix  of approaches to a homogeneous, secure environment for language models, i.e. an LLM operating system. In addition to the results of their own research, they use traditional elements for protection, such as process separation, rights management, hypervisors, etc.

Scientific Background

sequire technology played a leading role in the discovery of the most important vulnerability in the area of Large Language Models (LLM). 
In the current OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, the Indirect Prompt Injection vulnerability discovered by sequire technology is the number one threat; The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) also warned about this in a separate publication. The research combines own findings on LLM vulnerabilities with known principles from the field of operating systems and computer security systems and computer security to create a secure environment for running LLMs.

Technology

LUBIS EDA has developed a software tool for the verification of digital integrated circuits (IC) which are part of a lot of semiconductors. With this tool, LUBIS EDA can automatically generate the Verification Intellectual Property (VIP). This VIP can then be used to ensure that there are no functional flaws and bugs within the IC. Functional bugs can not only lead to a malfunctioning semiconductor but can also be an entry point for security issues. The verification methodology is based on the so called “Formal Verification” technique for semiconductors.

Scientific background

Dr. Tobias Ludwig has developed a new and efficient methodology for the generation of the VIP within his time as a researcher at the TU Kaiserslautern. His dissertation resulted in a software prototype that implements this methodology. Dr. Michael Schwarz has done his dissertation at the same chair as Dr. Tobias Ludwig and is an expert in Formal Verification as well as Hardware-Software-Interfaces. Dr. Max Birtel holds a degree in business engineering and was a researcher at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and the SmartFactory Kaiserslautern in the field of Industrie 4.0 .

Technology

Kertos is a no-code SaaS solution connecting an organization’s entire infrastructure to manage personal data and fully automate privacy processes. By executing workflows, handling data subject requests, and building self-maintaining records of processing activities, Kertos makes manual privacy (GDPR) compliance a thing of the past. The integration of external systems plays a central role in the automation of data privacy tasks. This requires corresponding API keys, access tokens or comparable access information. Kertos develops a hybrid zero-trust architecture to make sure data transfer takes place only between the (potentially on-premise) worker nodes and the integrated systems. Thus, the Kertos backend itself never comes into contact with costumers’ API keys or customer data.

Scientific Background

Kertos focuses on the automation of processes, the secure management of privacy requirements and the simplification of everyday workflows for all stakeholders involved. The founders Dr. Kilian Schmidt, Johannes Hussak and Alexander Prams combine relevant practical experience and professional knowledge, which they acquired at renowned universities such as the Technical University of Munich and the Humboldt University of Berlin. While Dr. Kilian Schmidt, with his background in law and first-hand experience with legal processes, takes on the role of "legal expert" in the founding team, Johannes Hussak contributes expertise in product development and innovation as CPO and COO. The team is completed by Alexander Prams, who is responsible for the technical implementation of the Kertos solution in his role as CTO and with his field of expertise, automation.

Technology

NetBird is a next generation solution of network access and security that has been developed as open-source software since 2021. The platform combines Zero Trust principles with a highly scalable peer-to-peer network enabling organizations and teams to securely connect remote resources. It is based on Wireguard® and provides a fast and secure network for any use case, that verifies policies and client context at the edge, not at centralized gateways.

Scientific Background

NetBird has a team with over twenty years of experience in software and infrastructure engineering fields. They come from their countries' best information systems and computer networking universities with a focus on information security. They built their careers in data, automation, and security engineering, always providing the best user experience while keeping security a default option.

Technology

Simplyblock is a clustered cloud storage solution that provides users with the ability to create virtual (logical) block storage devices, that scale arbitrarily in size and speed, yet work just as simple as a locally attached disk. Built upon the industry-standard, and fast NVMe over Fabrics protocol, simplyblock combines a multitude of backing storage technologies (local and remote block storage, as well as object storage) but provides a single, holistic view of the logical device. Furthermore, the solution enables automatic tiered storage (moving data between backend storages for price and performance reasons), as well as industry-expected features, such as compression, deduplication, encryption, and more.

In addition to that, features like immediate snapshots, remote backups, automatic self-healing, and our intelligent data balancing algorithms, as well as enhanced disaster recovery mechanisms help mitigate the dangers of ransomware attacks, or other types of security breaches that cause data loss, data encryption, or data corruption. Simplyblock integrates advanced cybersecurity features to recognize and stop new attack vectors and offer an immediate recovery in situations where data was already modified, aiming to bring a RPO (Recovery-Point-Objective) of 0, hence no data loss, to the world.

We want to democratize the ability to use cloud storage the way the user needs it, not the way it is offered by cloud providers.

Scientific Background

The simplyblock team combines decades of experience in different field, product-related fields, such as distributed systems, storage solutions, cloud infrastructures. Our technology is based on industry-proven components like SPDK (the Storage Performance Development Kit), a framework supported by industry giants such as Intel, and uses NVMe over TCP as the underlying transport protocol, providing an out of the box experience available in Linux and Windows. The combination of components provides an easy to use and high-performance solution to companies running IO-intensive workloads, such as databases, in the cloud.

Technology

At the heart of the Xpect approach to modeling safe processes is a representation formalism that not only maps temporal sequences of actions, but also captures their semantics by linking them to existing knowledge. In this way, it becomes possible to prove central properties of abstract processes and concrete sequences and to correct them if necessary. By monitoring the current execution of a process, the violation of central security or compliance rules can be detected in advance and the occurrence of a critical state can be avoided.

Scientific Background

Most of Xpect's employees have many years of experience in artificial intelligence research. For example, many of them were employees at DFKI, with which there is still close cooperation. In addition, they have gained relevant experience in management consultancies or companies in large-scale industry, which pays off in particular when it comes to identifying relevant issues and assessing the weaknesses of current solutions.

Technology

The Cybervize platform is designed for organizations of all sizes to strengthen their cybersecurity. This solution includes an AI-based SaaS component that identifies risks, recommends cybersecurity measures, and assists with implementation. As an integral part of Cybervize, a moderated user forum promotes knowledge sharing and provides practical guidance. Human advisors provide targeted expert assessments to assist with implementation and conduct periodic reviews upon request.

Scientific Background

Cybervize's technology is based on the application of AI technologies and SaaS solutions to automate cybersecurity processes. The solution draws on proven cybersecurity practices and processes, as well as information security and risk management best practices, to provide a comprehensive and cost-effective cybersecurity solution specifically for small and medium-sized businesses.