Corsha Announces $1.8 Million AFWERX TACFI Grant Award

Corsha provides a Zero Trust Platform for service-to-service communication across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.

WASHINGTON, June 22, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Corsha, a Washington D.C. -based cybersecurity company that provides an innovative approach to securing machine-to-machine communication, today announced it has received an $1.8 million grant award from the AFWERX program that extends its Direct-to-Phase-II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract. This initiative works to solve a critical Operational Technology (OT) challenge of securely moving data across shop floor networks and into Digital Engineering platforms running in IT networks.

Sponsored by the Air Force Sustainment Center (AFSC), their Technical Director, Mr. Roger Jones and an extensive AFSC team at Warner Robins, GA, the grant will allow Corsha to extend its Phase II AFWERX SBIR D2P2 efforts. It will launch a pilot program to determine how to enable AFSC to securely move data from additive manufacturing, data aggregation, and analysis devices into Digital Engineering (DE) platforms in an automated, secure, and trustworthy way.

"Corsha provides a first-of-its-kind Zero Trust platform that allows the secure movement of data from machines that may be legacy, nonstandard or wanting in terms of their connectivity and security posture," says Anusha Iyer, CEO & Founder of Corsha. "In the case of AFSC, too often shop floor operators follow ad-hoc methods where they must manually retrieve data. Our hope is that Corsha's technology will empower AFSC engineering teams to use this streaming OT data to guide their digital engineering workflows and decisions in ways that address legitimate security concerns."

With a deep background in the Department of Defense and Intelligence communities, Corsha first took their Zero Trust Platform for Machines to the government sector through several AFWERX SBIR opportunities that have provided a wonderful pathway for a small business to engage with the Federal Government. The TACFI effort aims to provide an expansion opportunity to scale out the work that Corsha has been doing with AFSC Warner Robins across more use cases and machine enclaves. The TACFI effort is a great example of small businesses, the federal government and private venture investment coming together to advance cutting-edge technology at the intersection of commercial and national security interests.

"This extension of work coalesces with current priorities in AFSC around establishing a Zero Trust Data Fabric and a real-time digital thread all the way from the shop floor to the top floor," says Iyer. "Corsha's Zero Trust Platform deployed at scale fills a much-needed gap of strong identity and authentication for non-person entities (NPEs), key pillars needed to build a comprehensive Zero Trust strategy."

About Corsha

Corsha is a D.C.-based cybersecurity startup that has come up with a novel way to secure machine-to-machine communication, whether that "machine" is a workload running in the cloud or a piece of industrial IoT equipment on a shop floor. Many companies today leverage static secrets such as keys, tokens, and certificates in order to secure communication between machines, but these secrets are getting leaked at an alarming rate and high-profile enterprises across the public and commercial sectors continue to suffer data breaches due to vulnerabilities surrounding these insecure non-person connections. Corsha has developed a Zero Trust security platform that sits at the intersection of machine identity, Zero Trust and API Identity. Corsha's patented platform builds dynamic identities for trusted machines and securely authenticates API requests through one-time-use MFA credentials for greater security, visibility, and control. Corsha's Zero Trust Security Platform, which can be deployed as Corsha Cloud (SaaS) or Corsha Enterprise (self-hosted), is fully automated, cloud-native, highly scalable, and platform agnostic.

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SOURCE Corsha