It's been over six months since New Mexico Inno picked out 10 startups in the state that we thought were primed for big things in 2023. Since we're now more than halfway through the year, New Mexico Inno wanted to follow up with those startups to see how things are going and if our January predictions were accurate.
Over the coming weeks, New Mexico Inno will roll out stories checking in with our 2023 Startups to Watch. Next up is Proof Labs, which has expanded its work at a national center in Colorado Springs.
Click here to see the full list of New Mexico Inno's 2023 Startups to Watch.
This story was updated Aug. 21 to note that Proof Labs is no longer considering applying for the Hyperspace Challenge 2023 cohort, its CEO said.
Proof Labs wants to help keep satellites safe from cyberattacks. But to do that, it needs customers to work for and partners to work with. Acceptance and recent expansion into a Colorado-based aerospace group has given the Albuquerque startup a foundation to find those potential customers and new partners, its co-founders said.
Ricardo Aguilar, CEO, and Dick Wilkinson, CTO, co-founded Proof Labs in 2021. After pivoting to become a space-focused company in March 2022, the startup has sought out opportunities to run what are called "cyber vulnerability assessments" on space assets like satellites. Those assessments can identify cybersecurity risks and instruct companies on how to address them.
It joined a national space information-sharing organization last summer. The Space Information and Analysis Center, or Space ISAC, is headquartered in Colorado Springs. It houses a Cyber Vulnerability Lab, where Proof Labs runs a lot of its operations.
"I think both Dick [Wilkinson] and I agree that Space ISAC has given us a great jump start and leveraged some great opportunities," Aguilar said.
The biggest boon for Proof Labs' business through Space ISAC has been the startup's exposure to a community of space manufacturers and non-government space companies. For instance, Wilkinson said he met the director of Amazon's satellite initiative, called Project Kuiper — an opportunity he said he wouldn't have found otherwise.
Wilkinson recently moved to Colorado Springs from Albuquerque to be closer to Space ISAC. He said Proof Labs is one of the only companies that does regular work at the Cyber Vulnerability Lab. He's also taken a leadership role in the growing organization.
"Even though we are a member company, we're advising the leadership on how to grow this vulnerability lab into a sustainable long-term project," Wilkinson said.
Aguilar said the startup is currently working on setting up "a sizable contract" that could be formalized in the next couple of months. It also completed a few smaller contracts prior to Wilkinson moving to Colorado at the end of June.
The startup has worked with the University of New Mexico's COSMIAC, a research center within the university's School of Engineering, to build out its cybersecurity forensics business model. And although Aguilar and Wilkinson planned to apply for the 2023 cohort of the Hyperspace Challenge — an accelerator program for the U.S. Space Force that's hosted in Albuquerque which announced in July a partnership with the Space Force's Rapid Capabilities Office — the pair said they decided to forgo that opportunity.
All of these efforts go toward creating business opportunities for the startup, which, although without any contracts currently, sees potential work in Colorado and New Mexico before the end of the year, its co-founders told Albuquerque Business First.
"We feel that given the position that we're in now, I would suspect if you ask us six months from now, it'll be a different story," Aguilar said. "That stuff takes a long time. The business that we're in is not overnight. We'd love to get contracts in place pretty quickly, but that's part of working with government and commercial. These things do take a little time."
