The Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) was established under the enabling authority of the Appropriation Act - Item 252.B7, Special Session I, 2018. Its objective is “to serve as an engine for research, innovation, and commercialization of cybersecurity technologies, and address the commonwealth’s need for growth of advanced and professional degrees within the cyber workforce" (Virginia State Budget, 2018).

Our ambitious vision is to establish Virginia as a global leader in cybersecurity and, by doing so, help diversify the economy of the commonwealth, attracting investment and jobs.

In Fiscal Year 2025 (FY25), we continued to see a significant increase in new research contracts from sources outside the commonwealth, as well as additional emphasis on our workforce development and innovation programs. Virginia is unique in the country in establishing this large-scale collaboration of institutions of higher education (now with 47), and the investment continues to pay off in jobs (and, crucially, a skilled workforce that can fill those jobs!), spinouts and startups, and the reputation of our academic institutions. This report highlights some of the major achievements of the past fiscal year.

Contributing to the Virginia Cyber Economy. The strength and uniqueness of CCI lie in unprecedented cooperation between 47 institutions of higher education in Virginia. Over the past six years, we have become an important contributor to the Virginia cyber economy through our research, innovation, and workforce development programs. In FY25, CCI faculty members attracted more than $84 million in new cybersecurity research grants and contracts to the commonwealth, and CCI activities contributed 960 jobs, corresponding to $79 million in labor income and over $114 million in contributions to the Virginia GDP. Together, CCI universities reported a new high of $108 million in R&D expenditures in computer science in 2023 (the most recent year for which such data are available), a 45% increase since the establishment of CCI. If CCI were a university, it would rank eighth in the country in computer science research expenditures, between Penn State and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Virginia remains a leader in the cyber workforce, with the largest number of information security analysts in the country, outpacing states like California and New York on both a per capita and total basis. Federal spending on cybersecurity contracts in Virginia exceeded $560 million in 2024, accounting for 29% of the national spending on cybersecurity contracts from the federal government. While we are closely monitoring a potential slowdown in overall research funding by the federal government, we are confident that cybersecurity will remain an investment priority for the Nation’s prosperity and national security.

Innovating in Cybersecurity. Innovation is a crucial part of our mission. Our Commonwealth Cyber Incubator + Accelerator (CCI+A) offers two tracks to help faculty researchers move their work from the lab and into the marketplace. CCI’s CATAPULT Fund supports teams from Virginia public universities to move new inventions towards commercialization; this year, the fund is supporting five teams working on products such as nanoantennas for tamper-resistant communications and watermarking for large language models. CCI’s ASCEND Fund helps startups in Virginia collaborate with faculty experts; this year, we are funding five teams of experts collaborating with startups: OneTier Corp, FraudOptics, Taurus nuEnergy, Critical Shift Corporation, and CodeLock, Inc. Our innovation programs support new inventions through the ideation, feasibility, and validation phases, positioning these teams to attract investment funds from the private and public sectors. In the past two years, CCI researchers filed 26 new intellectual property disclosures. Downstream from this, Virginia continues to significantly outpace our neighboring states in our ability to attract federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) funds. In 2024, cybersecurity-related innovation represented 50% of the SBIR/STTR awards to Virginia companies, totaling $133 million.

Strengthening Cyber Startups in Virginia. In addition to the ASCEND Fund, Virginia cybersecurity startups engage with CCI in numerous ways across our three mission lines of workforce development, research, and innovation. We often partner with startups in large-scale research projects funded by federal agencies in the Departments of Defense and Commerce. We also place students in internships in startups and subsidize their stipends. To date, at least 105 startups have directly benefited from CCI programs; some of their logos are shown here. Fend Incorporated, a startup that produced data diodes and unidirectional gateway solutions and that received support from CCI in the early days of our initiative, was acquired by OPSWAT in 2024. Ampsight, a startup previously supported under CCI+A, was acquired by Vibrint for a confidential, undisclosed amount. These are among many success stories that illustrate the growth and strength of the cyber startup ecosystem in the commonwealth.

Launching CCI Spinouts. We have launched 12 spinouts to date: these are new companies in Virginia offering cybersecurity services and/or products, and founded by CCI faculty and students. CCI typically provides support at the early stages of ideation, prototyping, and development of the business model for those companies. In FY25, five new spinouts were launched: WiSights Labs, with founders from UVA and North Carolina State University and a mentor from Virginia Tech, pioneers secure and efficient Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Model solutions for advanced telecommunication networks. CyberMirage, founded by a Mason faculty member, protects the copyright of web images and documents. Wadjet Security, founded by another Mason faculty member, is a cutting-edge cybersecurity company specializing in threat hunting and the protection of cyber-physical systems. RAEMAP LLC, founded by an Old Dominion University (ODU) research scientist, has created a software platform for real-time eye-tracking and cognitive state monitoring. And Chronosys LLC, focused on accelerating wireless scheduling through intelligent softwarehardware co-design, was founded by a junior faculty member at Virginia Tech (VT). Three years ago, we provided funding for Symple Solutions, a CCI spinout founded by VCU faculty member Carl Elks; having attracted interest from Dominion Energy and international industry, the company is today on the verge of a major deal.

Investing in AI. Our biggest program in FY25 focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for cybersecurity and cybersecurity for AI. These two areas are deeply interconnected: the vast majority of cybersecurity systems today rely on AI for everything from intrusion detection to user authentication; on the other hand, no system that relies on AI can afford to ignore the privacy issues and cyberattack risks involved. This year, we have invested $1.6 million in seed grants in AI. Each of these grants brings together a team from at least two CCI universities to tackle issues such as the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for intrusion detection that relies on behavioral analysis, AI for biometric authentication, and privacy-preserving federated learning for public health surveillance. AI also figures prominently in virtually all the new inventions that we have funded this year through our various commercialization programs and is an integral part of CCI workforce development programs. In an editorial in the Richmond Times Dispatch, we have made the case that, to win the AI war, we need to prioritize investments in developing a skilled workforce in this area.

Partnering with Industry. Partnerships with companies of all sizes continue to be a tremendous growth area for CCI. In the last fiscal year, we launched a new Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC), co-funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) and industry: the Center for Wireless Innovation towards Secure, Pervasive, Efficient and Resilient Next Generation Networks (WISPER) IUCRC focuses on the development of secure 6G technologies. In these highly competitive grants, NSF provides core funding for the administration and management of the center, and industry has the leading role in funding and selecting research projects to be conducted. WISPER currently has 13 industry members and brings in approximately $1 million in funding every year; the center is led by the CCI Executive Director and involves Virginia Tech, Mason, and the University of Arizona. This year, we also joined another IUCRC, Cyber SMART, with a focus on cybersecurity solutions; Dr. Gretchen Matthews, CCI Southwest Virginia Node Director, also serves as site director at Virginia Tech for Cyber SMART. Another large-scale industry collaboration of note is the ACCoRD project, funded by National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and led by AT&T and Verizon. Key portions of this $42 million research and testing project are conducted in the CCI xG testbed. In FY25, VCU received the final disbursement of a $17.8 million project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and supporting a unique industry-academia partnership for industry-specific training and hands-on research for graduate and undergraduate students. This project, the Convergence Lab Initiative, was launched by the CCI Central Virginia Node Director, Erdem Topsakal. Approximately 30% of the research funding that CCI researchers attract comes from the private sector and partnerships, such as the ones described here.

Preparing the Future Cyber Workforce. We continue to expand our experiential learning programs, with 1,114 students engaging in these CCI programs in FY25. We have supported the establishment of a statewide Virginia Cybersecurity Student organization, VCyS, the first of its kind in the commonwealth. VCyS organizes a Capture the Flag (CTF), CyberForge, open to all Virginia students, with support from CCI and private sponsors. In partnership with Virginia Military Institute (VMI), we organize an annual CTF between Virginia universities and community colleges, CyberFusion. Our multiple internship programs, from a pipeline into college to the graduate level, continue to be ourmost popular student-facing programs. Additionally, CCI’s cyber traineeship program enables professionals to make the transition from other jobs into cybersecurity while being placed in their future employers and learning on the job. Through a partnership with the Virginia State Police, we continue to run a year-long internship program that provides undergraduates with hands-on experiences with digital forensics, and in some cases, even in support of real cases being investigated. Through our Cyber Clinics program, 41 students to date have provided cybersecurity services to small businesses in their locality. CCI also funds Radford’s Professional Accelerated Cyber Education (PACE) program, offering cybersecurity competency-based training for professionals across Southwest Virginia; in its first year, the program enrolled 62 participants. And this fiscal year, we ran highly popular project-based learning programs with our partners CACI, Microsoft, PBS, and Guidepoint Security.

Engaging with the Public. Cybersecurity threats can affect us all, and CCI engages with the broader public to inform and demystify issues such as cyberattacks, privacy, data stewardship, the prevalence of artificial intelligence, etc. In our unique CyberArts program, experts in cybersecurity and in the creative arts reimagine and depict the results of cybersecurity research for either scientific or creative arts purposes. The resulting exhibits, displayed in the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria from October 2024 to January 2025, were seen by 170,000 visitors. A representative comment, left in the visitor book by a Virginia high school teacher: “As a high school teacher, I’m really excited to encourage my students to visit this exhibit. I’m hoping that it will make them excited to potentially study CS [computer science] not just for the ’lucrative’ job, but to be a part of something special, creative, and to have the chance to make work that is touching, inspiring, and thought-provoking." We also continue to engage the public through our website, which had 70,000 distinct visitors this year, a nearly 50% increase from the prior year, and through our rapidly growing social media channels.

This report details the many programs, industry engagements, research breakthroughs, student activities, and contributions that CCI has made in the past fiscal year. These programs are conceived and run by the dedicated staff and faculty in the CCI Hub and the Northern, Central, Coastal, and Southwest Virginia Nodes. And above all, the success of CCI is a result of the collaboration between more than 350 faculty members and thousands of students engaged in making Virginia a global leader in cybersecurity.