Venture Kick supports Soverli

(CONNECT) Mobile phone operating systems are becoming ever more complex and larger because the demands placed on the devices are constantly increasing. According to a press release from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich(ETH), this also means that the attack surface is becoming ever larger. Its spin-off Soverli AG will now launch a technology developed at ETH Zurich that allows isolated areas to be set up on smartphones. The market launch is being supported by Venture Kick from Schlieren with 150,000 Swiss francs.

The technology was developed at ETH by computer scientists led by Professor Srdjan Capkun and Assistant Professor Shweta Shinde. Post-doctoral students Ivan Puddu and Moritz Schneider have founded the Zurich-based start-up Soverli, which will launch the corresponding smartphones on the market. The new architecture creates areas on the phone that are completely separate from each other. In these domains, "apps or separate operating systems can run independently of the actual operating system and access memory or sensors separately", according to ETH. "The difficulty was to completely isolate these domains and make it possible to switch between them without sacrificing user-friendliness," Puddu is quoted as saying. Soverli has found a solution for this and had it patented.

The funding from Venture Kick will enable Soverli to implement customer projects in security-relevant sectors, which should accelerate market entry. "Venture Kick was a great help in turning our research into a company," Puddu is quoted as saying by Venture Kick. "Beyond the funding, the program gave us orientation and the visibility we needed to prepare for market entry." ce/jh