We speak to Ian Stevenson, chief executive of Cyan, a developer of forensic data analysis tools for serious crime investigations.

Scotland has been renowned for its scientific, financial and literary innovations ever since the Scottish Enlightenment pushed it to the forefront of European thought-circles in the 18th century.
The nation was to experience a pinnacle in culture and the economy, riding the common-sense credo espoused by its national poet Robert Burns, and the imperial trading links forged through its then-recent union with England.
Today, Scotland remains blessed with some of the world’s finest academic research and possesses a stake in the engine of a global economic power.
Yet there is a reluctance to truly seize the mettle and, too often, a tendency to downplay globalisation potential of its spinouts, according to Ian Stevenson, chief executive of Edinburgh Napier University-founded crime forensics analysis software producer Cyan.
Scottish founders needed to chase bigger rewards in the international arena and find more opportunities to stress the credentials of its research, which was a match for anywhere in the world, Stevenson argued.
He noted: “We need to make sure that companies just starting up display global ambition from day one and do not focus too much on the local market in Scotland or the UK, but really show the world what they can do.
“Us Scots can be a little modest, certainly if you compare it to the way founders would talk about their businesses in Boston, Palo Alto or Cupertino. We need to get past that and demonstrate we have world-class universities across the UK and especially in Scotland.”
Stevenson has been involved with Scotland’s innovation scene for a while – in addition to Cyan, he spent a year as a commercial manager at UniKLasers, a precision laser manufacturer affiliated to Heriot-Watt University, in 2015 and 2016. But the meticulous detail Cyan is paying to the market-fit of its technology has especially enthused him.
Detectives employ Cyan’s technology to compare potentially incriminating evidence on the suspect’s devices against a database of child abuse and terrorism-related materials, helping to inform quick-fire decisions on whether to press charges.
The company is currently focused on three product lines, including a flagship, USB-based platform for detecting child abuse and terrorism, and an online safety programme that blocks the same content in collaboration with website operators.
With regards to the USB-based service, Stevenson observed: “The technology replaces processes that typically take many hours in a lab with something a frontline officer can perform on the scene of a crime to get evidence for a case.
“One of the problems [with conventional forensics] is that often people live in a home with other people.
“When the police serve a warrant, they are serving against an IP address linked against a real-world address, but not actually an individual suspect.”
In addition, Cyan also aims to launch a third product for end-to-end encrypted instant messaging apps that would preload automatic child abuse checks into the software to avoid violating privacy regulations.
Stevenson explained: “This would be built into the infrastructure of the app, and the privacy regulations would require this was appropriately disclosed in the terms of service.
“The key is that it does not do anything to inform any third-party about the nature of the content that is being shared, or allow them to track what they are sharing.
“It simply enables the app developer to detect when it is known child abuse, and to take whatever action is appropriate in their jurisdiction.”
The spinout’s chief technology officer is Bruce Ramsay, a former lecturer and senior research fellow at Edinburgh Napier who previously spent eight years in law enforcement as a forensic computer analyst.
Stevenson praised Ramsay’s devotion to forensic crime analysis and his desire to alleviate the workload of police officers investigating child abuse, a crime that can cause enduring emotional distress.
Stevenson is now making sure Cyan can act on his own advice, having scaled its business into a number of overseas markets, including key partnerships in France, Germany and the US. But its roots lie in Scotland’s vibrant early-stage funding ecosystem, which Stevenson said surpasses some of UK-wide innovation supports.
Many of the grants on offer at the country’s economic development board Scottish Enterprise, for instance, are ongoing programmes that fund spinouts on a case-by-case basis, in contrast to competitive equivalents from UK-wide commercialisation grant body Innovate UK.
Stevenson added: “In Scotland, we have a similar smart innovation scheme – but the process is different to [Innovate UK]. It is permanently open and not based on a quarterly cut-off point.
“Rather than six proposals being funded each quarter, good proposals are funded as and when they come along, until all money is spent.
“This way, it is much easier to integrate with investor funding, because you can get a high level of assurance from Scottish Enterprise that you have got a smart grant, which helps you attract the investor money to match it.
“By comparison, with Innovate UK smart awards, you have to be able to demonstrate the match funding before you can even apply.”
Success for Cyan’s product would strengthen the reputation of its founding institution in the cybersecurity space. The university has multiple spinouts working on cybersecurity applications – many of which, among them Cyan, share a co-founder in Bill Buchanan, a professor of cryptography at the School of Computing.
Buchanan recently helped establish another Edinburgh Napier venture, this time focused on ransomware attacks – Memcrypt – and he already has at least two exits to his credit at cybersecurity spinouts Symphonic Software and Ping Identity.