VerifyWise selected for Wavestone's UK Cybersecurity Startup Radar 2026

VerifyWise has been selected for Wavestone's UK Cybersecurity Startup Radar 2026, in the Securing AI category.

The radar maps the UK cybersecurity innovation ecosystem: 225 startups across 21 domains, published in July 2026. Securing AI is one of the smaller domains on the map, sitting alongside better-established ones like network security, incident response or identity management.

Two figures, side by side

Wavestone reports two figures that belong side by side. The share of UK cybersecurity startups embedding AI in their own products rose to 62 percent, up from 30 percent a year earlier. The share building products to secure the use of AI rose to 10 percent, up from 7 percent.

Adoption of AI inside security products doubled in a year. The share of companies working on securing AI moved by three points.

Most organisations now run models they did not build, cannot inspect and did not procure through anything resembling a review. The tooling to govern those models is being built by a tenth of the ecosystem.

Where VerifyWise fits

VerifyWise works on the governance side of that gap. Find the AI your teams are using, including the tools nobody registered, and map it to the rules you answer to: the EU AI Act, ISO 42001 or your own internal standard. Then the evidence is ready when an auditor asks for it.

That is also what shipped in our most recent release. VerifyWise 2.5 added template-first reporting with run history, so a report generated in March stays retrievable as the March record rather than being overwritten by today's data. It also moved frameworks to an extension model, so an internal standard your risk team wrote gets the same treatment as ISO 42001 or the EU AI Act.

The rest of the report

The radar is worth reading beyond the category listings. A few findings stood out:

• 144 of the 225 startups are new to this edition. The early-stage ecosystem is expanding quickly.
• 8 scale-ups and 1 unicorn. Startup creation is outpacing scale-up conversion by a wide margin.
• 38 percent name market access as their main barrier, ahead of funding and recruitment. Finding prospects is harder than building the product.
• 42 percent are based outside London and the South East, so the ecosystem is spreading beyond the capital.
• 67 percent export outside the UK, with Europe, the Middle East and Africa the primary gateway.

Thanks to Wavestone for the work that goes into mapping an ecosystem this fragmented. Read the full radar on their site.