NTT Research, Inc., a division of NTT, 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.
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“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.”
Source: BusinessWire