CyberCat is a network of researchers established in 2022 with the common goal to develop leading-edge knowledge in categorical cybernetics and applied category theory, and to show its economic usefulness.

The Institute for Categorical Cybernetics was incorporated as a non-profit in 2024 to provide an institutional backbone for the network’s activities.

Its purpose is to support CyberCat’s whole innovation pipeline from basic research to spinning off high-tech ventures. At the basic research level, it coordinates research activities among its members including funding and joint implementation of research projects, as well as hosting informal and formal events. At the other end of the funnel, the Institute acts as an incubator for ventures with the express goal to discover and commercialize economically useful technologies.

The first incubated technology of our research network, the Open Game Engine, was successfully turned into a for-profit company in 2023, 20squares. This startup is fully operational, independent, and profitable.

This initial success convinced us to found the Institute, seeded with funding from the startup.

In 2024, the CyberCat network saw two more technologies crossing into startup territory:

  • A dynamic pricing engine
  • A novel approach to quantum cryptography

The former acquired the first major corporation, an international airline, as a client. The latter received significant venture funding to commercialize its technology.

Other technologies currently in incubation include multiple forms of compositional machine learning (deep, reinforcement and variational), and applications to difficult microeconomic problems such as mechanism design. Our plan is to spin off at least one to two technologies per year into standalone entities.

This setup and modus operandi was selected to avoid common pitfalls in the academic technology transfer world, and to keep administrative overhead as light as possible.

CyberCat was designed around the shared belief that the set of highly abstract mathematical principles we caption as categorical cybernetics (and applied category theory more broadly) can have immediate social and economic value, that an informal exchange among like-minded researchers, practitioners and founders is the best way to discover promising technologies, and that for-profit spin-offs are the best way to demonstrate economic feasibility.

The CyberCat Institute is currently the vehicle for activities that require an incorporated non-profit entity such as application for research funding or contracting for applied research, especially in the open source ecosystem.

In the near future, we envision the Institute to become a fully staffed organization, to also organize regular events (meetups, conferences, summer schools) and publish both scientific and popular periodicals. By design the spin-off activities take precedence, and the Institute remains a separate legal entity.

As such it is supposed not to replace, but to support the informal “invisible college” at the center of CyberCat.