UCF Innovation District company first to receive a NIST SBIR grant in Central Florida in more than a decade
ORLANDO, October 7, 2022– The National Institute of Standards and Technology is not a well known federal agency, but its role is one of the most important in government. Virtually everything people use has their standards and measurements set by NIST.
For a company like USEncryption, which is changing how confidential data is shared, NIST is one of the most critical agencies as its technology is brought to market.
Recently, USEncryption was awarded a $100,000 SBIR grant from NIST to further develop the technology. It is the first SBIR grant awarded to any Central Florida company from NIST since 2008 and only the seventh grant in Florida in the past 20 years.
“It was very important for us to get close to NIST as they are the agency that sets the standards for data encryption,” says Leandro Veltri, CEO, USEncryption. “It’s not just giving us money, they are truly engaged with the companies when they award grants like these.”
According to the agency release, “the nearly $4 million in funding that was awarded to 19 small businesses. The competitively selected proposals were submitted in response to a call for innovative products addressing specific technical needs in areas including advanced communications, cybersecurity and privacy, health and biological systems measurements and advanced manufacturing.”
“These grants are extremely rare, just two other UCF Business Incubation Program clients have received them ever,” says Carol Ann Logue, director, programs & operations, Innovation Districts & Incubation Program, University of Central Florida. “To qualify, you have to have a platform innovation that can be utilized across and impact everyday life.”
USEncryption addresses one of the biggest cybersecurity threats today when confidential data needs to be analyzed. While data can remain encrypted in transit or in storage, it still must be decrypted to be processed, leaving the data open to attack or theft.
This patented solution was born from the work of two professors of physics: Eduardo Mucciolo, of the University of Central Florida, and Claudio Chamon, of Boston University.
Their years of research in the areas of quantum information processing and quantum computing now have the potential to solve an urgent issue that has baffled cybersecurity experts who know the risks taken when certain data, like medical records and financial information, is used in an unsecure environment.
“Our vision is for our technology to be the standard for processing confidential data, like HTTPS is for data in transit over the internet,” Veltri says. “That’s our moonshot and we think we can get there.”
In addition to the three co-founders, the company currently employs four in Central Florida and is targeting to bring the technology to market in 2024.
# # #
For more information media should contact –
USEncryption: Leandro Veltri, CEO, (929) 256-6047, info@usencryption.com
UCF Business Incubation Program: Carol Ann Dykes Logue, 407-635-9882, carolann.dykeslogue@ucf.edu or Alan Byrd, Alan Byrd & Associates, 407-415-8470, Alan@ByrdConnections.com
About USEncryption: USEncryption creates new opportunities to securely compute and share confidential data with full privacy and security. Our innovative Encrypted Operator Computing (EOC) method allows the processing of encrypted data at scale: compute and extract insights from encrypted data without having to decrypt it first, never compromising its privacy, security and regulatory compliance. Use cases include training machine learning models on encrypted data, and making predictions from encrypted or unencrypted data. For more information, please visit usencryption.com.
About the UCF Business Incubation Program: The University of Central Florida Business Incubation Program is a community resource that provides early-stage companies with the tools, training and infrastructure to become financially stable, high growth/impact enterprises. Since 1999, this award-winning program has provided vital business development resources resulting in over 300 local startup companies reaching their potential faster and graduating into the community where they continue to grow and positively impact the local economy.
With eight facilities throughout the region, the UCF Business Incubation Program is an economic development partnership between the University of Central Florida, the Corridor, Orange, Osceola, Seminole and Volusia Counties, and the cities of Kissimmee, Orlando and Winter Springs. For the 2017/2018 fiscal years, the activities of these participating firms have helped to sustain more than 6,725 local jobs and have had a cumulative impact of over $725 million on regional GDP and over $1.3 billion on regional sales. During the same period, the program has returned more than $12.00 in state and local taxes for every $1.00 invested in the program. In addition, for every $1.00 of public investment the firms also produced $118 of additional regional GDP and $226 of regional sales. For more information, visit www.incubator.ucf.edu.
