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This is the second of a three-part series about the Northern Virginia Node of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative’s activities.
In 2025 CCI NoVa Node expanded its Commonwealth Cyber Incubator + Accelerator (CCI+A) to quickly move university-developed cybersecurity innovations and Virginia-based startups to the marketplace. CCI+A provides 16 weeks of programming, where teams attend business development workshops and engage with prospective customers, partners, experienced tech mentors, serial entrepreneurs, investors, and others to evaluate the commercial potential for turning their technologies into successful products, processes, and services. Teams receive $75,000 from either the Cyber Acceleration, Translation, and Advanced Prototyping for University Linked Technology (CATAPULT) or the Academic Support for Cybersecurity Entrepreneurship and Next-Gen Development (ASCEND) programs. The funds help innovation teams pay for critical resources, personnel, and the time to test products and obtain initial market feedback that is so important for seed or angel funding.
“When entities leave our program, we continue to watch and measure their progress as they secure new funds and add jobs and impact to the Virginia economy. To date, the CCI+A program has supported 34 early-stage cybersecurity entities,” said NoVa Node program manager Jordan Mason.
One such success story is that of Craig Yu, an associate professor of computer science and co-founder of a virtual reality startup. He said he found the support from the CCI NoVa Node invaluable. “The CCI+A program inspired me to pursue technology commercialization as a faculty entrepreneur,” he said. “Its intensive training gave my team rare opportunities to present our innovations and commercialization strategies to serial entrepreneurs and investors. Their feedback deepened our understanding of our technical edge and helped us pivot toward a more commercially promising direction.”
Following the CCI+A training, and with additional support from the CCI internship program, Yu has been collaborating with student interns from computer science, electrical engineering, and computer game design on the design, development, and testing of AI-powered VR innovations.
“One of our interns, Mohammed Esmael, is a rising senior majoring in computer science with a minor in entrepreneurship. This summer, he and I completed our second Innovation Commercialization Assistance Program (ICAP) training, where we explored ways to transfer the latest generative AI inventions from my lab into personalized, VR-based fitness training,” Yu said. “Mohammed aspires to become an AI technology entrepreneur after graduation, and it's impressive that he has already begun this journey during his undergraduate studies.”
President and CEO of Fairfax County Economic Development Victor Hoskins added that George Mason’s reputation for accepting and graduating high rates of students is essential for the region. “George Mason is the total access university,” he said. “Mason has the largest public university enrollment in the commonwealth and 70 percent of its workers stay in this region. We take advantage of that to recruit companies, and we connect companies to George Mason because they have projects, they have ideas, and they have things that they want to explore.”
In our next installment we will explore how CCI NoVa Node shapes and expands the research enterprise.