Startup incubator designed to transform fundamental research into viable products and services primes market with its first product: SaltGrain, a zero-trust data security suite
News Highlights:
- NTT Research is launching a startup incubator, Scale Academy, led by NTT veteran and NTT Research SVP Product Innovation Bennett Indart, to iterate and grow breakthrough products and services that emerge from labs and R&D initiatives across all NTT divisions.
- Scale Academy’s first product is SaltGrain, zero-trust data security suite that leverages attribute-based encryption (ABE), a technology first proposed by Dr. Amit Sahai and Dr. Brent Waters, NTT Research’s Cryptography and Information Security (CIS) lab director.
- Scale Academy announced at Upgrade 2026, NTT’s annual research and technology innovation summit, which features keynotes, sessions and more than 30 exhibits on emerging technologies and products—including SaltGrain—from global NTT companies.
Sunnyvale, Calif. – April 15, 2026 – NTT Research, Inc., a division of NTT (TYO:9432), today announced the launch of Scale Academy, a startup incubator responsible for bringing to market products and services based upon technologies studied within the labs of NTT Research and NTT R&D. NTT Research also revealed Scale Academy’s first product, SaltGrain, a zero-trust data security suite powered by attribute-based encryption (ABE). Leading Scale Academy is NTT Research SVP of Product Innovation Bennett Indart.
NTT Research announced Scale Academy at Upgrade 2026, the company’s annual research and technology innovation summit taking place April 15-16 at the Signia by Hilton San Jose.
Scale Academy: From Academic Research to Market Reality
NTT Research was founded as a corporate subsidiary with a mandate to engage in basic scientific research. Now in its seventh year of operations, NTT Research has also formalized a duty that aligns with its corporate status, namely: to identify technologies with strong commercial potential and guide them through the early phases of business success.
Its newly established Scale Academy is executing that role with SaltGrain, a zero-trust data security suite that leverages ABE, a cryptographic scheme first proposed in a 2004 paper co-authored by Dr. Amit Sahai of UCLA and Dr. Brent Waters, who now serves as the director of NTT Research’s Cryptography & Information Security (CIS) Lab. The product name combines Salt – a term for enhanced hash security – with Grain, which alludes to ABE’s ability to provide access to data on a granular level.
“As NTT Research enters its ‘2.0’ phase, we are launching Scale Academy to iterate and grow the most promising new NTT technologies into market success,” said NTT Research President and CEO Kazu Gomi. “As the first case out of Scale Academy, we will push SaltGrain, which we believe the market is ready for. SaltGrain is a data security suite that breaks the prevailing all-or-nothing file-access paradigm, closes cybersecurity gaps and enhances privacy protection, which is much needed in the environment where AI agents are everywhere and playing a wide variety of roles.”
Startup incubators, well-known to venture capital firms, large universities and R&D-focused corporations, provide new ventures with separate governance and explicit resource allocation, which business analysts—from Geoffrey Moore to the McKinsey Group—have long associated with startup success. The Scale Academy at NTT Research will support breakthrough products that originate in its own four labs and in others throughout NTT.
“Business start-ups have their own rhythms and incentives that quarterly metrics miss,” Indart said. “Scale Academy accommodates those realities, with SaltGrain providing a timely entrance amidst AI risk acceleration, gaps in network and identity controls and the growing need to protect data wherever it moves.”
SaltGrain: Enterprise Security for the AI Era
Transforming traditional thinking of cybersecurity and privacy, SaltGrain taps ABE to bind access policy to the ciphertext itself and allow fine-tuned access control to data. SaltGrain’s ABE functionality is wrapped within a zero-trust framework, enabling many use cases that involve document sharing while protecting sensitive parts within the documents. This solution also supports image or video documents. The data protection provided by SaltGrain is much needed in the era of AI agents that need to access data or documents for learning; however, privacy and sensitive information must be properly protected. Also, thanks to a recent performance breakthrough by NTT Research scientists, the ABE core of this data security suite is prepared for post-quantum deployment.
SaltGrain targets enterprises and institutions managing high-value or regulated data, such as financial services, healthcare and global technology providers, where secure collaboration and data sharing are essential—but the cost of a data breach can run into millions of dollars. Unlike conventional security models that depend on perimeter defenses or coarse access controls, SaltGrain’s application of ABE enables organizations to share and analyze data with greater confidence by controlling access to sensitive portions of the data. This potentially unlocks new use cases in areas like cross-organizational analytics, where AI agents can also be involved.
SaltGrain is the first in what NTT Research anticipates will become a portfolio of technology-driven products managed by Scale Academy, which provides stage gates and seed-round funding for this inaugural launch.
For additional information on Scale Academy, please visit https://ntt-research.com/scale-academy/ or attend Upgrade 2026, the two-day event hosted by NTT in San Jose that explores the evolution of scientific discoveries and innovative concepts into real-world products and systems. In addition to keynotes and panel sessions, Upgrade 2026 will feature an EXPO with more than 30 exhibits showcasing emerging technologies from global NTT companies.
About NTT Research
NTT Research opened its offices in July 2019 in Silicon Valley to conduct basic research and advance technologies as a foundational model for developing high-impact innovation across NTT Group’s global business. Currently, four groups are housed at NTT Research facilities in Sunnyvale: The Physics and Informatics (PHI) Lab, the Cryptography and Information Security (CIS) Lab, the Medical and Health Informatics (MEI) Lab and the Physics of Artificial Intelligence (PAI) Group. The organization aims to advance science in four areas: 1) quantum information, neuroscience and photonics; 2) cryptographic and information security; 3) medical and health informatics; and 4) artificial intelligence. NTT Research is part of NTT, a global technology and business solutions provider with an annual R&D investment of thirty percent of its profits.
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