YUDU Sentinel has been awarded funding from Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, for a 12-month research and development project to strengthen how critical national infrastructure operators respond to cyber attacks - applying artificial intelligence, under verified human oversight, to the work of managing an incident when normal IT systems can no longer be trusted.
The project, co-funded by Innovate UK through through its cyber scale programme, will introduce artificial intelligence to reduce the administrative burden carried by crisis management teams during a live incident — helping them keep accurate records, maintain situational awareness and meet reporting obligations while working under extreme pressure. Every output remains subject to human review and approval before it is used.
Cyber attacks increasingly take out the very systems an organisation would normally use to coordinate its response: email, file shares, directories and internal messaging. YUDU Sentinel provides an out-of-band communications platform, hosted entirely separately from a client’s corporate IT, that allows leadership teams to communicate and run the response when their own systems cannot be trusted or cannot be reached.
“Innovate UK’s support is an independent endorsement of what we have been building since 2018. It allows us to accelerate work that would otherwise have taken years of bootstrapped development, and to do it alongside operators who run critical national infrastructure and will hold us to their standards.”
said Richard Stephenson, CEO of YUDU.
The work will run over 12 months from September 2026 and is delivered with the support from SP Electricity North West and Lancaster University.
