Riverside’s Deepbits Digs Deep to Stop Cyber Attacks

Published: 10/21/2022

The City of Riverside is proud to support National Cybersecurity Awareness Month and the local companies working tirelessly to protect us. Businesses worldwide fall victim to cyber attacks every 14 seconds, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. That means the level of auditing required to probe internal software for unknown threats has grown beyond the resources and capabilities of most companies.

“There is a critical need for cybersecurity strategies and systems to identify and mitigate these threats at the earliest stage of the software development cycle and at the most minute levels possible,” said Heng Yin, founder and CEO of Riverside-based startup Deepbits Technology. “That’s where we come in to uncover various threats in cloud services.”

In 2016, after moving from Syracuse University for a tenured faculty position in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, Riverside, Yin had an idea to commercialize the intriguing software security research from his lab. One of his Ph.D. students, Xunchao Hu, teamed up with him as CTO, and together they launched Deepbits in 2017.

“I always had a passion for putting my research into practice,” Yin said.

Yin’s passion led to developing a next-generation threat management platform that utilizes artificial intelligence (AI), specifically deep learning, to root out vulnerabilities, malware, and code plagiarism. What makes the technology unique is the platform can accomplish this in minutes, from one location, and without the need for source code.

When Yin and Hu set out to build Deepbits they faced many challenges, including a lack of funding and business acumen in a growing competitive cybersecurity industry. To help overcome these hurdles, Deepbits was invited into the UCR-led ExCITE Riverside Incubator. From there, Deepbits earned awards from the Office of Naval Research and National Science Foundation to keep them afloat. Meanwhile, ExCITE provided the startup with office space and connected them with mentors to show them the business ropes.

“We continue to learn a lot from our mentors and feel fortunate for a home at ExCITE,” said Yin, who moved Deepbits to the incubator’s new location in downtown Riverside.

With ExCITE’s help, Deepbits was able to secure a grant from the City to help pay for its patents. Deepbits later built an AI-powered platform that generates software bill of materials (SBOM) directly from application binaries to firmware images and continuously protects by integrating to the software supply chain lifecycle. They secured additional funding from a private investor, and plan to go after venture capital this year in a seed round.

Yin said it’s an incredibly exciting time to be in the cybersecurity space as a startup that has something valuable to offer.

“It’s very important in terms of critical infrastructure and national security,” he said.

Deepbits technology was recently accepted into Amazon’s AWS Marketplace, an online software store for qualified partners. Yin said Deepbits will be tapping their neighbor startups at ExCITE as the first batch of trial users.

“With cybersecurity threats becoming more frequent, I’m proud to have a defender like Deepbits doing everything it can to stop attacks in their tracks from Riverside,” said Riverside Mayor Patricia Lock Dawson. “A tenacious startup like Deepbits greatly enhances our region’s cybersecurity capabilities and growth potential.”

For more about Deepbits Technology, go to www.deepbitstech.com.