2022-Finland-Gradient

GEORGE HARPER: Thank you, good afternoon. It's my pleasure to introduce Gradient Technologies. We're a cybersecurity startup based in Boston, just near MIT. Back in 2018, when we were founded, cybersecurity threats and regulatory environment seemed much simpler, much less acute than it is today.

Our inspiration came from a much different place-- our founder's previous startup. Christian Wentz had just sold his company that built technology to connect computers to brains. Why might one want to do that? Turns out there are all sorts of meaningful problems to solve and address, like paralysis and blindness.

But the problem that really kept him awake at night was not developing this core technology so much as once it's developed, how can we trust the computer that we're going to be connecting to the brain? How do we know that it's the right computer that has not been compromised, or alternatively, how do we prevent connecting to a computer that is maybe the right computer, but has malware on it? Or even worse, we connect to a computer that's pretending to be the right computer, and it turns out to be a hacker in North Korea, for example.

Our company was founded, really, to answer these core questions in a really fundamental way. We are building technology to secure every computing device by addressing the root causes of malware and ransomware. If you go back about 12, 13 years ago, 2009, there was a massive incursion called Operation Aurora that attacked many organizations around the world for months on end.

As a consequence of this, Google decided to rethink how it approached cybersecurity. The US National Security Agency said, hey, we need to come at this problem from a different way. We need to assume that we've been compromised.

And yet, subsequent to that, despite this huge wake-up call, we're facing increasing pace, sophistication, and impact of breaches, and critical infrastructure is at acute risk, and facing new regulatory challenges. And that's because the root causes behind this have not been addressed. And we assert that there are two.

The first is that credentials-- user passwords, device certificates-- are too easily compromised and stolen. And the second is that advanced cybersecurity solutions don't address the lower parts of the system in the firmware that treats those areas too much as trusted. Our solution, Gradient Security Mesh, delivers fundamental solutions to these root causes, and prevents breaches before they occur by doing two things.

One is that we anchor credentials to the core platform, and the second is that-- so that those credentials are useless if stolen. And the second is that we measure a full security posture of the platform such that, on a continual basis, we verify that the platform has integrity.

We have a piece of software that goes on any device-- anything from an IoT, up to a cloud application-- and we verify that continually. Quick example application. One of our pilots is a US oil and gas super major, and we protect the critical infrastructure of that.

Their challenge is that computer domains that used to be very separate-- operational technology, IoT, IT, cloud-- they've all converged with digital transformation, and this has increased the risk of these environments. We put our software on the various devices. And going back to this brain-computer connection thing, we're able to verify the identity and the integrity of every device on the platform, and communicate this so that we can identify problems before they occur. We'd love to talk to any organizations interested in cybersecurity or privacy concerns, and thank you for the opportunity to introduce Gradient.

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