2022 has been a memorable year in many ways. For Xiphera, it has meant new people, collaborations, opportunities, and projects. Now, while sliding into the holiday festivity mood, it is a good time to take a look at Xiphera’s past year.
Start of the year: Projects, partners, products, people
The year started with a new AI-NET-ANTILLAS project announcement – a sub-project of the bigger AI-NET project gathering up to 100 organisations from seven different countries, Xiphera in Finland being one of the companies contributing to the ANTILLAS sub-project. The goal of the AI-NET is to accelerate digital transformation with artificial intelligence (AI) industrial research and relevant proof of concept (PoC) demonstations.
Spring 2022 included a webinar in Xiphera’s webinar series Cryptography under the hood as well as a product launch in the Public-key cryptography product family. We also published our white paper addressing security in Open Fronthaul (download the white paper here) as well as joined BittWare’s partner program in May. Additionally, two new employees joined the company: Tommi Lampila as Director, Business Development and Perttu Saarela in the R&D team.
Summer: What a birthday celebration!
Expecting the pace to slow down in the summer? For us, luckily, it just accelerated in June! After our second webinar of the year, Xiphera was accepted for the Young Innovative Company (NIY) funding from Business Finland in late-June – the funding enabling the companies to strengthen their team and develop business strategy and reach new potential markets. Almost at the same time we also concluded our first-ever financing round led by anchor investor Gorilla Capital and joined by Korpun Seed of SijoittajaPRO and Ääkköset Oy as well as individual investors. Could you think of a better way to start the well-deserved summer break? Neither can we!
During the holidays in July, the cryptographic community was living interesting times when the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the winner algorithms of Round 3 of the Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standardisation process. For Xiphera, this meant new R&D projects for the fall in our upcoming PQC product family.
This summer marked also as Xiphera’s fifth birthday – a significant milestone for a growing company like us! The half-a-decade mark was celebrated with the whole company in August with an exquisite custom-made cake and fun team activities, concluding with a nice dinner.
End of the year: Big changes, bigger announcements
After the summer vacations, we were back to work with full speed. The fall season was kickstarted with our last webinar of the year, discussing the PQC. Also, a new product launch for the Cryptographic hash functions product family was announced around Halloween. In November, Xiphera published a joint white paper with Flex Logix, discussing the solutions for the quantum threat with PQC on embedded FPGAs (eFPGAs). Download the white paper here.
The last month of the year 2022 has been as busy as the rest of the year, if not busier. We launched our new quantum-secure xQlave™ product family of PQC algorithms on the first of December. The new xQlave™ product family offers a comprehensive collection of quantum-secure key exchange and digital signatures which are based on the winner PQC algorithms of the NIST competition and implemented as Intellectual Property (IP) cores directly to hardware. xQlave™ allows Xiphera’s partners and customers to design future-proof systems that are protected even against the threat of quantum computers. Read more about the xQlave™ product family.
In mid-December also a big project concluded when an online course Introduction to Cryptography was opened. This MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) is a free-for-all course that gives an introductory to the world of cryptography and its mathematics. The course langauge is Finnish and its primary target groups are high school and university students interested in mathematics as well as those who are already working and want to update their skills in cryptography. Xiphera has developed the course with the support from Technology Industries of Finland Centennial Foundation, Finnish Information Security Cluster, Aalto University, and other educational and industrial institutions.
We concluded the year with moving our office. It was time to say good bye to A Grid building which had served as our headquarters for nearly four years. The moving distance was not long, as our new office space is located just 1,300 meters to the west from A Grid. The new office is in the Innopoli 1 building in Otaniemi, Espoo. Now, surrounded by moving boxes and getting used to the new working environment, we are slowly starting our Christmas holidays and celebrations.
It has been, least to say, an eventful year for us full of new winds and opportunities around every corner. We want to thank our customers, partners, investors, employees, and others with whom we’ve had the honour to share this year. Let the next year be as successful as this one was for us!
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year from the whole Xiphera team!
