Engineers in Business supports City, University of London’s CitySpark business ideas competition which is open to students and recent alumni.

A special category, MakerSpark, was created to recognise the innovations created by engineering students, and this element is supported by a £3,000 EIB prize fund.

The CitySpark competition focusses on finding problems, identifying real gaps in the market and building evidence-based start-ups from day one.  CitySpark places a core focus on encouraging students to ‘get out of the building’, meet target customers and develop a full understanding of the problem to be solved. This provides an excellent starting point for brilliant ideas to develop into fully-fledged business ventures.  The competition is split into two challenges taking place throughout the academic year to help students develop entrepreneurial skills and launch a business.

The MakerSpark prize covers the two challenges and we are delighted to announce that Alien Security, a new cybersecurity consultancy, has won £1,000 in the first challenge.

Alien Security, which already has clients, provides ethical hacking services for the purpose of finding security vulnerabilities that a malicious hacker could potentially exploit.

Founder and CEO, Noor Alrayes, who is studying the  MSc Cyber Security course said: “Cybersecurity is not only a technology problem but also a people problem, which is why we offer cybersecurity support to clients and tailor our services to their needs”

Working with clients, Alien Security causes ‘serious chaos’ testing IT environments and physical cybersecurity to maximise cybersecurity defence.

We will be back later in the year to update on the final winner of the MakerSpark prize in the grand final!