Brno's Cybersecurity Cluster: Inside the Region Investors Call "the CEE Fort Knox"

South Moravia's Regional Innovation Index rose from 87.3 per cent to 101 per cent of the EU average between 2016 and 2023 — a 22.3 per cent improvement that put the region ahead of the European benchmark, according to the latest data report published by JIC, the South Moravian Innovation Centre. Brno now records around a quarter of the country's PhD graduates annually, and nearly half of its recent university graduates have come through science and engineering faculties, per JIC's own analysis — a pipeline that has made the city, alongside its strengths in electron microscopy, semiconductors and space technology, a natural home for cyber security specifically.

The engine room: JIC

JIC, established in 2003 as a joint venture between the South Moravian regional government, the city of Brno, and four local universities including Masaryk University and Brno University of Technology, is the connective tissue behind most of the region's cyber and deep-tech activity. The organisation manages three physical incubators — including a dedicated biotechnology incubator — plus a venture capital fund with CZK 500m (roughly €20m) under management, and runs KYPO Cyber Range, a training facility that puts through approximately 1,500 cyber security professionals annually.

Brno's start-up formation rate reflects that infrastructure: 147 new technology companies were registered in the region in 2023 alone, and JIC's own incubator occupancy sits at around 95 per cent, according to industry analysis published by KiTalent. A further CZK 450m in EU cohesion funding has been earmarked to expand JIC's capacity specifically for AI/ML start-ups and cyber security spin-offs.

The capital problem

The constraint on Brno's cyber cluster is not talent or ideas — it is scaling capital. Only around 8 per cent of Czech ICT venture capital has historically been deployed into South Moravian companies, per KiTalent's analysis, despite the region's outsized contribution to the country's engineering talent pool. Dealroom figures cited by regional outlets put total 2023 investment into South Moravian technology companies at roughly €31.1m — a fraction of what flows into Prague-based companies in a comparable period.

The practical consequence, according to sector analysts, is that capital to scale a Brno-founded cyber security company typically has to come from Prague, London or Berlin — and when it does, it tends to pull the company's centre of gravity, and often its headquarters, away from Brno with it. Brno's innovation infrastructure, in other words, works; its scaling infrastructure largely does not.

Where the talent gap is sharpest

Three shortage categories dominate hiring conversations in the cluster, according to KiTalent's regional assessment: embedded cyber security — secure boot, hardware security modules, cryptographic protocols for aerospace and automotive applications; cloud-native infrastructure engineering, spanning Kubernetes and platform engineering; and AI/ML engineers with regulatory fluency in the EU AI Act and the NIS2 network-security directive. Demand for AI auditors and compliance-literate security architects is an entirely new hiring category, driven directly by EU regulation, and the local training pipeline has not yet caught up with it. The added complication is that KYPO's training output, while substantial, is aimed primarily at upskilling existing employees to meet NIS2 certification requirements rather than producing net-new hires — meaning the 1,500-professional annual throughput does not translate directly into 1,500 new workers entering the market.

Names in the cluster

Curated by JIC, a current cohort of companies to watch spans healthcare, industrial automation and cyber security specifically — ACTOSens, Citymind, Lightly, EpiQ and Veriteus were highlighted at the most recent Velvet Innovation Conference showcase. More established regional cyber security companies have previously secured backing from investors including Springtide Ventures and Rockaway Capital, and at least one South Moravian cyber security firm has been named to Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 for Central Europe.

The strategic read for 2026

Brno's cluster is best understood less as a single breakout story in waiting and more as critical national infrastructure: the region trains a disproportionate share of the engineers who go on to staff cyber security teams across Prague-headquartered companies, multinational delivery centres, and — increasingly — the automotive and industrial sectors adjusting to new EU cyber and AI-safety regulation. Whether Brno itself captures more of the equity value it helps create will depend largely on whether the new EU cohesion funding earmarked for JIC succeeds in closing the scaling-capital gap that has defined the cluster for the past decade.