Kaspersky launches open innovation programme; WeKan announces future of work cohort

Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky is inviting startups and individual projects to collaborate on developing cybersecurity solutions for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) under its open innovation programme.

Kaspersky Innovation Hub (iHub), the Moscow-based firm’s innovations arm, will offer the winners a platform to launch their pilot projects with Kaspersky, according to a statement.

The programme will invite the best initiatives to participate in pilot projects where they will work jointly with Kaspersky on product development. The winners will also receive technical and business mentoring from the company’s experts.

The programme also helps the winning teams with access to Kaspersky’s channel partners (including distributors and resellers), clients, and prospects, the statement added.

Startups with a legal entity, product, or prototype can apply until September 13, 2020. Selected entrepreneurs will be invited to present their projects in front of a jury during online demo selection days scheduled between September 29-30, 2020.

“With our new startup call, the Kaspersky Innovation Hub aims to enhance our efforts with innovators to meet the specific needs of small and medium-sized organizations,” Vitaly Mzokov, head of the Innovation Hub at Kaspersky, said.

WeKan

New York based product accelerator WeKan has launched a new cohort named Future of Work that will accelerate and support startups working on collaborative work tools.

The key focus areas for the cohort would be builder tools (low code systems), developer tools, design systems, sales tools, scaling backend operations as a service, the gig economy, and work life balance platforms.

It offers a 30-day equity free accelerator programme for startups from India and the US. Shortlisted companies from the programme will get up to $100,000 in exchange for 7-10% equity. 

WeKan’s accelerator programme aims to help startups achieve product-market fit (PMF). A team of product and growth experts will work with the selected startups to achieve PMF, drive product led growth experiments and automate sales processes to enable scale.

WeKan is a product-led growth accelerator and early stage venture fund focusing on pre-seed and seed-stage companies in business-to-business and future of work domains. It claims to have accelerated about 20 companies till date.