PORGiESOFT Security Awarded Grant from NCSC Growth Fund to Accelerate Smishing Detection Technology

February 1, 2022 (Cambridge, UK) – PORGiESOFT, a UK national security startup focused on protecting citizens from cyber-fraud, today announced it has been awarded funding from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) Growth Fund. The Growth Fund provides funding for PORGiESOFT to use to enable or speed-up progress on a specific part of its products or service as decided by NCSC.

The grant will accelerate the development of PORGiESOFT’s SenseText consumer smishing detection platform to protect UK citizens - expanding SenseText PORGiESOFT's cyber-fraud detection platform to include a (1) API and (2) web portal and to migrate SenseText from an enterprise phishing product to a consumer smishing product.

Scam messages also look more convincing than ever, making them harder to detect. 60% of Britons were targeted over the last year, according to the Guardian. Fraud is now the most common crime in the UK, representing more than 40% of all crime and costing consumers and businesses over £1.2 billion annually, according to UK Finance. Among the most pressing threats is smishing – fraudulent text messages designed to trick people into clicking malicious links or sharing sensitive information. Studies show that 95% of UK citizens cannot reliably detect scam texts, and the number of smishing attempts has increased by more than 700% in recent years.

Addressing the Smishing Challenge

Building on its enterprise-focused phishing tools, PORGiESOFT will use the NCSC Growth Fund to expand SenseText into a consumer-first platform. The project will deliver:

• • A Web Portal – allowing citizens to paste suspicious SMS messages and instantly receive a fraud risk score and safe/unsafe classification.

  • An API Service – enabling banks, telecoms, and government agencies to integrate real-time smishing detection into their chatbots, apps, and websites.

  • Training & Awareness Features – every analysis provides fraud insights to help end-users learn how to spot scams, making detection both protective and educational.

Together, these tools will empower citizens to get a “second opinion” on suspicious texts in just two clicks, reducing their risk of being a victim to complex scams.

PORGiESOFT Leadership on Wider Global Security SMS and Fraud Risks

“Fraud is not only a financial crime, it’s a wider global security issue undermining public trust in digital communications,” said George Brown, CEO of PORGiESOFT. “With NCSC’s support, we can accelerate development of SenseText to protect ordinary people from smishing – ensuring that citizens feel safer, more confident, and more resilient online. The smishing detection would be driven using natural language processing, domain risk analysis, text emotion detection and semi-supervised learning.”

Industry and National Security Relevance

The project directly supports NCSC’s mission to make the UK the safest place to live and do business online. By equipping the public with practical detection tools, SenseText complements law enforcement efforts, strengthens fraud reporting pipelines, and helps banks, courier services, and public agencies defend against impersonation attacks.

The platform also paves the way for PORGiESOFT’s broader anti-fraud research and services initiatives. Together, these initiatives demonstrate how government support can catalyse innovation in cybersecurity and consumer protection reducing fraud losses across the UK.

ABOUT NATIONAL CYBER SECURITY CENTRE (NCSC) - www.ncsc.gov.uk

Since 2016, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has safeguarded the UK’s critical systems and online services, delivering world-leading guidance, tools and frameworks for business and citizens alike. When cyber attacks occur – or services are disrupted – we provide incident response to minimise harm, restore operations, and help organisations get back on their feet. The NCSC was formed by combining separate parts of government, MI5 and GCHQ to create the National Technical Authority for cyber security. We lead the UK’s defence against the most advanced cyber threats, including those from nation states, hackers, and cyber criminals.

The NCSC works closely with international allies, law enforcement and the UK’s intelligence and security agencies to ensure we understand the cyber threat, and how we can defend against it. We also harness talent across schools, universities, and the tech community, driving research into emerging technologies to explore new ways to reduce harm at scale. At the same time, we are investing in the UK’s national security by nurturing the next generation of expertise that the expanding cyber security sector needs to thrive.

ABOUT SENSETEXT

SenseText is an adaptive machine learning (ML) fraud detection platform that helps enterprise employees to detect suspicious messages and emails quickly using a simple fraud risk score. At each workstation, we aim to protect our customers from cyber fraud, intelligently reducing the risk of fraudulent transactions using machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). SenseText allows customers to further train, customise, build and expand the base fraud detection statistical model to improve fraud detection accuracy. With SenseText, organisations can be more confident and have that extra layer of artificial intelligence (AI) cyber protection.

ABOUT PORGiESOFT Security

Founded in Cambridge in 2018, PORGiESOFT Security builds AI-first fraud intelligence digital assets and financial education solutions to protect citizens, institutions, and infrastructure from smishing, phishing, scams, impersonation, and cyber-fraud. Backed by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC, part of GCHQ), PORGiESOFT Security partners with industry, academia, and government agencies to fight cybercrime at scale.