A small cyber-resilience firm in Clitheroe, Lancashire has won competitive government funding to solve a problem most businesses only meet on their worst day: what to do when a cyber attack takes your own IT systems down with it. YUDU Sentinel has been awarded Innovate UK funding, reported at around £295,000 to £300,000, for a twelve-month research and development project, as the Lancashire Business View covered.
The project’s aim is unglamorous and, for that reason, useful. The company describes technology to manage cyber incidents when even the IT systems are down, applying artificial intelligence under verified human oversight. The target is operators of critical national infrastructure, the sort of organisation that cannot afford a bad day.
Two things about the award are worth holding in mind, though neither alone proves much. First, the competition was brutal. One of only fifteen successful applicants from 143 bids, according to Insider Media. Second, this is a company that has been at the problem since 2018. Chief executive Richard Stephenson framed the grant as recognition of several years spent building the technology, and said being selected through such a competitive process meant a great deal for a relatively small Lancashire business working in a highly specialised sector.
The wider context gives it weight. Ransomware and state-linked attacks have pushed incident response from an IT footnote to a board agenda item, and the assumption that your response tools run on the same infrastructure the attacker is chewing through has come in for hard scrutiny. A crisis-management layer that survives the incident is a different animal from a dashboard that goes dark with it.
Whether £300,000 and twelve months produces something sellable is impossible to say at this stage, and plenty of Innovate UK projects end in a report rather than a product. What can be said now is that a Lancashire firm beat 128 other companies for the money, and that the thing it is building addresses a failure mode that most security budgets still do not properly cover.