Cyber Scots: Scottish Innovators at the Forefront of a Global $500 Billion Market

A key dimension of cultivating a forum for accelerating Cybersecurity startup ventures is to build regional clusters.

Scotland is a small nation that punches well above it’s weight in the field of Cybersecurity and has built a portfolio of world-class businesses.

SDI sets the scene for the sector here, highlighting that almost 50% of the cyber companies operating in Scotland are start-ups who set up within the last 7 years.

The cybersecurity industry presents a wealth of economic opportunities for countries willing to invest in this sector. The global cybersecurity market is projected to grow from $193.73 billion in 2024 to $562.72 billion by 2032, presenting Scotland with a uniquely powerful export growth opportunity.

Education and Capacity

There is a deep expertise that is marshalled in different ways, such as providing informative resources to help educate individuals and organizations on how best to protect themselves. For example the CyberScotland Partnership is a collaboration of key strategic stakeholders, brought together to focus efforts on improving cyber resilience across Scotland in a coordinated and coherent way.

Police Scotland also set out to play a proactive role in educating the public and businesses, such as releasing an ‘Police CyberAlarm‘ service, to help businesses better understand and monitor malicious cyber activity. Since its launch it has identified over a billion potential suspicious events resulting in reports and advice being given to members, enabling them to take action to prevent a successful attack.

There are also government initiatives to develop local capacity, such as the The Scottish Cyber Coordination Centre (SC3), a new £1.5m central coordination cybersecurity centre to pool expertise from central and local government agencies, the NHS, higher education and police to provide threat intelligence and cyber incident response services to better protect organisations from international cybercriminals.

Commercialization

The startup activity of the sector is fuelled by a vigourous academic and research capability, such as Heriot Watt launching a ‘Quantum Hub‘ to fight cybercrime, as part of a £160m government investment to establish Britain as a global leader in quantum innovation and cybersecurity.

Other university programs include StrathCyber, the Cybersecurity team for the University of Strathclyde, operating a multi-million pound research portfolio extends across a diverse range of cutting-edge cybersecurity challenges. One of their spin-outs Lupovis secured a pre-seed investment of more than £615,000 from a syndicate co-led by Techstart Ventures.

An especially noteworthy leader of the sector is Napier University, championed by Professor Bill Buchanan, a stalwart of the industry who works tirelessly to help others succeed in the sector. He shares a regular series of expert articles and videos, and regularly speaks at industry events, a keynote figurehead who inspires new students and entrepreneurs to engage into their cybersecurity careers.

The university has a deep expertise that underpins academic learning and that also drives a powerful innovation commercialization program, with a stellar track record of spinning out successful cyber startups, such as the 2018 acquisition of Zonefox.

Cyacomb, their third cybersecurity spin-out, is advancing with world-leading innovation in digital forensics, and in 2022 TrueDeploy secured £200k from Scottish Enterprise. TrueDeploy helps enterprises improve their software security and protect privacy through innovative distributed ledger and Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) technology.

Cybersecurity Scotland: Startups and Service Providers

These are just some of Scotland’s cybersecurity companies, demonstrating the depth and breadth of the subject matter expertise the sector boasts.