Give to Gain in action: $15,000 in funding to back women-led AV startups.

Alex Kemanes and Dino Drimakis, long-standing leaders in the global AV and technology ecosystem, have announced the launch of the Women in AV & Tech Startup Prize, a global call designed to identify and back early-stage founders building practical, execution-ready solutions for the AV ecosystem and closely related fields. The competition is built as a long-term platform open to early-stage women founders.  Announced during the International Women’s month and supported by, The Audiovisual and Integrated Experience Association (AVIXA) Women’s Council, a global community committed to supporting and empowering women in the technology and AV industry.

In 2024, female-only founding teams received 2.3% of the $289 billion invested globally in venture capital around $6.7 billion underscoring the scale of the funding gap this initiative aims to address

“This is about taking action, not just having conversations,” said Alex Kemanes, Partner at Midwich Ignite and Regional Managing Director, MESEA at Midwich Group, who is personally supporting and funding the initiative. “If we want to see more women leading and building in our industry, we have to create practical pathways for them. The Women in AV & Tech Startup Prize is one way we are doing that. At the same time, we are backing founders who can execute, people who understand their market, define real problems, and have a credible path to building sustainable businesses.”

Submissions open 8^th of March 2026. Founders can apply from anywhere in the world, whether they’re involved directly with AV innovations or part of the AV ecosystem. The criteria to be selected is not based on revenue from the business, or a finished product; it’s rather solving a problem, market viability, and intent to build a lasting solution.

To enter, applicants submit a pitch deck (maximum 20 slides) and a short founder video. What matters is not designing polish, but thinking: the problem and who it affects, what’s being built and why it’s better, who the customer is, how the business makes money, and what stage it’s currently at, idea, prototype, pilots, users, revenue.

“This isn’t a pitch-polish contest,” said Dino Drimakis, Director, Strategic Development, MESEA, Midwich Group who is also personally backing the initiative. “We’re looking for clear thinking, real-world problem selection, and credible pathways to market. Fundamentals beat hype.”

The winner will receive a $15,000 cash prize, awarded and announced on 22^nd of April 2026. Any follow-up engagement is at the discretion of the jury and sponsors.

Submissions will be collected via the official competition platform and undergo an initial eligibility and quality review. Shortlisted applications will then be evaluated by an independent jury panel. Judging will focus on problem relevance, solution credibility, market understanding, founder insight, and execution potential.

To maintain the integrity of the program and its participants, the jury reserves the right to withhold the award if no submission meets the required standard. In such cases, feedback may be provided, or the prize may be carried forward to a future edition.

Key dates

• Call for submissions opens: 8^th March 2026
• Submission deadline: 6^th April, 2026
• Winner announcement: 22^nd April, 2026
• To apply: Women in Tech Startup

Delinea, a pioneering provider of solutions for securing human and machine identities through centralized authorization, has completed its acquisition of StrongDM, the universal access management company purpose-built for modern engineering, DevOps, and AI-driven environments.

As enterprises scale agentic AI and automation, privileged access is increasingly required by non-human identities (NHIs) that operate autonomously across hybrid and cloud-native environments, introducing risks that static, credential-based models were never designed to govern. By combining Delinea’s leadership in enterprise privileged access management (PAM) with StrongDM’s just-in-time (JIT) runtime authorization, organizations can discover every identity, reduce risk where it matters, and enforce least-privilege access at the moment of action, making Zero Standing Privilege (ZSP) achievable in practice.

“Standing and hard-coded privileges remain one of the largest sources of risk in modern, AI-driven environments,” said Art Gilliland, CEO at Delinea. “Security teams have historically had to balance between strong identity governance policies and maintaining developer and operational speed. By bringing StrongDM’s runtime authorization capabilities to the Delinea Platform, we’re empowering rapid and secure AI adoption for our customers.”

The combined Delinea and StrongDM platform brings together leading enterprise PAM and runtime authorization into a unified identity security control plane powered by Delinea Iris AI, enabling real-time policy evaluation and governance of privileged actions taken by both human and non-human identities across modern infrastructure.

Together, Delinea and StrongDM deliver:

• Discovery and governance of privileged access for every human and non-human identity across infrastructure, databases, containers, and CI/CD pipelines
• Reduced exposure to credential theft, phishing, and software supply chain attacks by minimizing persistent credentials
• Real-time governance of privileged actions taken by AI agents and other non-human identities through centralized visibility, auditability, and enforcement
  

“The rise of agentic AI and non-human identities is accelerating operational workflows to machine speed, exposing the limits of static privilege models,” said Emanuel Figueroa, Senior Research Analyst at IDC. “By incorporating StrongDM’s JIT runtime capabilities into the Delinea Platform, organizations can extend Zero Trust to the precise moment of action and advance toward ZSP across both traditional and cloud-native environments.”

Raghu Valipireddy, SVP and Chief Information Security Officer at Axos Financial, said: “I’m genuinely excited about the possibilities of a unified platform. Delinea has done an excellent job securing privileged access across traditional infrastructure for nearly a decade at Axos, while StrongDM solved just‑in‑time access in innovative ways for modern database and cloud environments. When Delinea articulated a vision to bring these capabilities together, it immediately resonated with how we operate and where we’re headed. The combined platform will significantly strengthen our security posture by enabling continuous discovery, governance, and real‑time enforcement of least‑privilege access across critical systems and data, which supports our AI initiatives and accelerates our move toward ZSP in alignment with business priorities.”

With this acquisition, Delinea establishes identity as the control plane for modern security, helping to ensure every privileged action taken by a human or machine identity is evaluated and authorized in real time, enabling organizations to eliminate standing privilege across AI-driven environments.

NETSCOUT® SYSTEMS, INC. (NASDAQ: NTCT), today released its second half of the year 2025 Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Threat Intelligence Report, revealing sophisticated attacker collaboration, resilient botnets, and compromised IoT infrastructure that drove more than eight million DDoS attacks worldwide – some as large as 30 terabits per second (Tbps) – marking a new era of hyper-scale, coordinated threat activity that continues to outpace global takedown efforts. Meanwhile, the accelerating growth of DDoS-for-hire services is empowering a broader range of threat actors, intensifying operational risk to digitally connected organizations and enterprises.

Implications for security professionals extend far beyond volumetric concerns and include reconnaissance and adaptive evasion which challenge traditional defense paradigms. Organizations must match adversarial innovation with intelligent, autonomous defenses, or risk operational disruption at levels previously considered theoretical.

“Threat actors identify organizations that haven’t invested in the right defenses to stay ahead of sophisticated and coordinated DDoS attacks to take down critical infrastructure,” stated Richard Hummel, director, threat intelligence, NETSCOUT. “Traditional security defenses are no longer working, and with attackers hitting new attack size and complexity ceilings, implementing automated and proactive defenses has become a business-level risk mandate – not just a technical concern for security professionals.”

Key research findings include:

• Massive attacks on a global scale – More than eight million attacks were identified across 203 countries and territories globally.
• Continued Use of Multi-Vector Attacks – approximately 42% of DDoS attacks employed two to five distinct attack vectors, with some adapting dynamically throughout the attack to complicate detection and mitigation.
• Outbound Attacks Impact Broadband and Mobile Services – Extensive direct-path attacks revealed that compromised IoT and customer-premises equipment can generate outbound floods exceeding 1 Tbps, creating liability, service, and reputational risk for broadband and mobile providers.
• Critical Infrastructure Targeted – High‑value services such as NTP and DNS continue to face sustained attack pressure, emphasizing the need for resilient, globally distributed architectures to maintain service continuity.
• Threat actors scale up collaboration – A surge of more than 20,000 botnet-driven attacks in July 2025 exemplified how coordinated threat activity can rapidly overwhelm defenses and disrupt critical government, finance, and transportation services.
• Threat actor persistence – Despite international law enforcement dismantling multiple DDoS-for-hire platforms, hacktivist groups and botnets remain resilient, exerting increased pressure.
• AI integration accelerates operations and collaboration – AI has transitioned to an operational reality, with large language models (LLMs) on the dark web accelerating vulnerability exploitation and botnet expansion, and underground forums documenting a 219% increase in mentions of malicious AI tools. Groups like Keymous+ have demonstrated how partnerships between threat actors amplify attack power, with bandwidth increasing nearly fourfold.

NETSCOUT maps the DDoS landscape through passive, internet vantage points, providing unparalleled visibility into global attack trends. For more than 15 years, NETSCOUT has delivered trusted, consistent DDoS Intelligence based exclusively on directly observed, verifiable attack traffic. NETSCOUT does not aggregate multiple alerts or geographically distributed events into composite peak values, ensuring accuracy, repeatability, and true comparability across reporting periods. Peak metrics reflect single-second maximum bits-per-second (bps) and packets-per-second (pps) rates measured at defined mitigation and monitoring points.

NETSCOUT protects two-thirds of the routed IPv4 space, securing network edges that carried global peak traffic of over 800 Tbps, covering 376 industry verticals and 12,698 Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) in the second half of 2025. It monitors tens of thousands of daily DDoS attacks by tracking multiple botnets and DDoS-for-hire services that leverage millions of abused or compromised devices.