We caught up with Barton Shields of Olympus Sky, a member of ICE71 Accelerate’s fourth cohort.

Q: Tell us more about yourself.
I’m Bart Shields, CEO and CTO of Olympus Sky Technologies, S.A. , also known as Olympus Sky, and we originate from Łódź, Poland.

Q: What inspired you to start your startup?
Back then, I wanted to solve the number one problem within the automotive industry –  providing security inside of the vehicle.

Q: What fires you up every morning?
Knowing that this technology completely changes how security is done, in that it simplifies and automates communication security, while also simultaneously providing a solution that is more secure than the current, traditional means for providing communication security (i.e. PKI + TLS/SSL).

Q: What is your goal or dream for your startup?
This are two parts to this goal: 1) to make our core technology an RFC specification and communication-layer standard, and 2) to change how the world does security.

Q: What is the problem you want to solve with your product/ solution?
Traditional security is human intensive and utilizes a centralized approach for the creation and management of security credentials, making it costly to implement, costly to maintain, and difficult to scale. IoT is expanding at a pace that is difficult to keep up with. This is especially true for trying to provide security at IoT scale in a cost and time efficient manner.

Because traditional security was never meant to operate within the complexity and additional requirements introduced by the proliferation of devices that IoT brings. Only those with sufficient resources have the capabilities of addressing the security gaps, which because of the complexity more than often fall short.  It is no secret that traditional security is becoming more complex each and every year.  Thus, increasing the threat surface and costs of maintaining security.

To put it simply, traditional security is meant for point-to-point, static links.  IoT is by definition dynamic and multi-point.  Thus, traditional security is the square peg and IoT is the round hole.

Q: Tell us more about your solution and who might find use for it.

Our security solution, Autonomous Key Management (AKM) makes security not only affordable, but significantly decreases the threat surface because of its simplicity.  AKM is easy to deploy, easy to maintain, and easy to expand at IoT scale. AKM solves the high costs and difficulties of providing security at IoT scale. It is completely automated with one-time provisioning, removing the human factor and any requirement to connect to a centralized server.  Last, our security naturally provides multi-point, end-to-end encryption, something that traditional security is incapable of (ex. the Zoom video acknowledgement from April in which they stated that PKI and TLS/SSL are incapable of multi-point end-to-end encryption).

The primary customer case for our solution would be Industrial IoT companies.

Q: What have you enjoyed the most being a part of the ICE71 Accelerate programme?
Meeting the mentors and other teams in the programme.

Watch Olympus Sky pitch at ICE71 Accelerate 4 Virtual Demo Day on 25th June! 

Learn more about Olympus Sky at olympusssky.com