We caught up with Stephanie Robinson of Assimil8, a member of ICE71 Accelerate’s fourth cohort.

Q: Tell us more about yourself.

I’m Stephanie Robinson, CEO and co-founder of Assimil8. We’re based in Brisbane, Australia.

Q: What inspired you to start your startup? What is your goal or dream for your startup?

Assimil8 was formed in 2018 as I was struggling to bring together data sets from disparate systems in order to make high level
recommendations for relationship management – specifically, I could not see how relationships were connected without completing a time consuming and manual process.

Working together with my CTO and co-founder Simon Robinson to develop the IDRIS tool – a cybersecurity solution by our startup Assimil8 – has been an amazing experience. Having spent most of our lives overlapping careers, it’s been especially rewarding to move forward with IDRIS together by means of Assimil8.

Over the years we have had many ideas, but IDRIS was really the one we felt most strongly had all the ingredients for success, to meet a genuine need in a growing market. Our goal is to find partners who can recognise both the immediate cybersecurity market opportunity and the wider applications of this technology.

Q: What is the problem you want to solve with your product or solution? Tell us more about your solution.

We know that SMEs are asking for better value from their cybersecurity providers, more efficiency at a lower cost. We also know that SMEs are not only more likely to be the target of an attack, but that an attack is far more likely to result in the closure of the business.

Most SMEs receive raw threat data via a tool created for enterprise, so we asked ourselves this – why is there nothing on the cybersecurity market designed for this part of the economy, given that these businesses support close to three quarters of jobs worldwide? We believe it comes down to three critical factors – cost, skills and psychological barriers. It is not easy to get good cybersecurity advice, and to understand or act on it.

Our solution IDRIS utilises sophisticated graph technologies to provide visual network views, which allow the user to identify anomalies or patterns for investigation, without the need for high-level technical skills. IDRIS does not come with an enterprise licence fee, and with IDRIS it is far easier to interpret results than traditional rows of raw data. The tool can provide a view of threats across an entire network, increasing the likelihood of identifying a threat and, crucially, its connections within that network.

Q: Who might find use for your solution?

More than three quarters of small and medium sized businesses expect at least half of their cybersecurity needs to be outsourced within the next five years, and 78% of these businesses plan to invest more in cybersecurity within the next year, according to the results of a 2019 Continuum survey of global SMEs.

Our plan is to provide these outsourced service providers with a competitive edge in an increasingly competitive market. IDRIS will be launched using an open source model, and we would like to set the bar that any good forensic analyst service would be using IDRIS. Think of IDRIS as plain English for network threat identification.

Q: What have you enjoyed the most being a part of the ICE71 Accelerate programme?

Learn more about Assimil8 at assimil8.com.au