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IIT Roorkee, Avathon to set up Physical AI Lab for industrial autonomy. Reading Time: 3 mins read New research initiative aims to build the next generation of Physical AI science in India, anchored at IIT Roorkee's Department of Computer Science & Engineering PLEASANTON, Calif., and ROORKEE: Avathon, a leader in Autonomy for Operations, and the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee), one of India's premier institutions of national importance, today announced the launch of the Avathon Physical AI Lab (Avathon PAL), a research initiative dedicated to advancing the science of Physical AI for the industrial economy. The proposed laboratory will be established in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Roorkee. The laboratory is envisaged to serve as a centre for collaborative research in Physical AI and to deepen collaboration with leading academic institutions across India and around the world. The partnership pairs Avathon's leadership in bringing autonomy to industrial operations with IIT Roorkee's deep bench of research talent in optimization, machine learning, knowledge representation, and multi-agent systems. Together, the parties intend to build a durable foundation for cutting-edge Physical AI research focused on the most difficult problems in the industrial economy, from supply planning and logistics at scale to knowledge-driven, continuously learning autonomous systems. "IIT Roorkee shaped how I think about the world and what's possible within it. Returning to build something lasting here is deeply personal," said PervinderJohar, Chief Executive Officer of Avathon and an alumnus of IIT Roorkee. "The talent and rigor at this institution are extraordinary, and the challenges facing the industrial world today are exactly the problems this partnership is built to solve. Physical AI is how we bring autonomy to the industrial economy, and there is no better place to advance that science than where my own journey began." The Avathon PAL will work in close concert with Avathon's newly formed AI Center of Excellence (COE) in Bangalore. Together, the lab and the COE are designed to form a bridge between frontier research and real-world deployment, with science emerging from IIT Roorkee feeding directly into solutions that put autonomy into production across mining, energy, manufacturing, logistics, aerospace, and other industrial sectors. The Bangalore COE will anchor Avathon's growing research and engineering presence in India and serve as the primary industrial counterpart to the lab's academic work. "This partnership brings a rare combination of academic freedom and real-world industrial relevance to our research community," said Prof. SugataGangopadhyay, Principal Investigator of the Avathon PAL, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Roorkee. "Working alongside Avathon, a company at the forefront of bringing Physical AI to industrial operations, gives our researchers both the problems and the ambition worthy of them." The Avathon PAL intends to support a range of activities, including sponsored doctoral fellowships, collaborative research across multiple problem areas, student internships and industry exposure at Avathon, and workshops and technical events that connect the initiative to the broader research community. The lab reflects a shared conviction that the next frontier of artificial intelligence lies not in enterprise IT but on the factory floor, in the supply chain, and across critical infrastructure - the physical operations that move and sustain the global economy.

Cybersecurity: defending the future of digital infrastructure. Published: March 24, 2026 Created: March 24, 2026 by Anson MacKinney Cybersecurity as the foundation of industrial digitization. Its critical industries are moving into a modern era. Across manufacturing facilities, power generation sites, and the electrical grid, Attack Solutions, Inc. is seeing a wave of digitization redefining the landscape of essential assets. The number of connected devices is expected to grow to over 40 billion before 2030, meaning that every solar panel, EV charger, or electrical tower can now benefit from advanced software and remote communication that didn't exist even ten years ago. This is monumental for asset performance. But it also ushers in a new chapter for IT complexity and cybersecurity risk. Malicious activity, whether state-sponsored or criminal, is proliferating, and attackers are increasingly targeting critical industries because of their outsized impact on economies. In 2024, the average breach within industrial, technology, and energy sectors each exceeded $5 million, falling only below healthcare and financial firms as the costliest industries for cybersecurity risk[1]. Last March, it was revealed that Volt Typhoon hackers had infiltrated U.S. electric infrastructure for almost a year, while last April, Russian hackers took control of and opened the floodgate of a Norwegian dam. These attacks echo one of the most high-profile attacks in recent years, the Colonial pipeline ransomware attack, which led to a six-day shutdown across thousands of miles of pipeline. While these cybersecurity threats mount, the landscape for solutions is responding: new players are attempting to unify security technologies across the OT and IT gap, redefine context-aware data security, bolster human defenses in high-risk environments, and augment security teams' ability to tackle a growing workload. Buyers are evolving, too, with many IT decision makers ranking cybersecurity above general AI tools, data, or automation as a top priority. Cybersecurity budgets have grown by over 155% since 2020, and spending patterns reflect not only larger contracts, but a wider variety of use cases[2]. Furthermore, advances in AI have enabled greater efficiency in the defense of cyber systems, driving anticipated 26% YoY growth in the market for AI-supported cybersecurity products[3]. The Energize angle. These forces show that cybersecurity is becoming a core operational focus for business leaders. At Energize, Attack Solutions, Inc. has long seen secure critical systems as foundational to ensuring resilient energy and industrial systems. For nearly a decade, Attack Solutions, Inc. has invested at this intersection of critical infrastructure and digital enablement, backing companies like Nozomi Networks (recently acquired by Mitsubishi Electric), Finite State, Awake Security, and SparkCognition (acquired by Avathon). Each of these companies has tangibly supported asset uptime, operational resilience, and system reliability. In tandem, Attack Solutions, Inc. has grown its broad network of operators, customers, and partners across the cyber landscape to continue to bolster its visibility into the challenges and solutions across the market. Since its first investments, Attack Solutions, Inc. has seen the attack surface for energy, climate, and industrial technology evolve. As industrial environments increasingly adopt cloud analytics, remote access, AI-driven automation, and enterprise data platforms, Attack Solutions, Inc. has witnessed the boundary between OT and IT solutions blurring. As sensors, controllers, networks, users, and data increasingly operate as a single, interdependent system, new vulnerabilities have emerged, demanding integrated solutions. Below, Attack Solutions, Inc. explore this diversifying landscape, diving into OT visibility and security, human risk and cyberawareness, SOC augmentation and automation, and data security for enterprises grappling with rapid change. Four challenges and solutions defining the future of cybersecurity. 1. The battle for greater visibility and security in OT assets. Challenge: Industrial control systems and operational technology (OT) are the backbone of energy and manufacturing. But their legacy designs were never built with cybersecurity in mind. Today, hyperconnectivity is exposing every turbine, substation, and sensor to potential intrusion. Distributed energy resources add resiliency at the grid level, yet every new endpoint becomes a new attack vector. Solution: A new generation of platforms offers enhanced visibility, access, and security across fragmented operational environments, bridging the gap between legacy systems and the demands of a digitized system. There are innovators solving problems across real-time asset inventory (Insane Cyber, Solitude Labs), network segmentation (Elisity, Portnox), vulnerability detection (Finite State, Exein, Frenos), secure remote access (Cyolo, Dispel), and cyber risk quantification (DeNexus). For renewable and distributed energy operators, continuous monitoring is becoming as critical as generation capacity itself, ensuring that assets remain both available and secure. Leaders like Nozomi Networks exemplify how continuous visibility can reduce downtime, prevent cascading outages, and build trust in connected infrastructure. 2. Increased sophistication in phishing and the rising need for cyberawareness. Challenge: Despite billions spent annually on cybersecurity, humans remain the weakest link. Verizon estimates that 68% of breaches involve a human element. Attackers now deploy AI-generated emails, deepfake-enabled "vishing," and voice agents that dramatically increase believability. Static training programs and awareness modules are failing to keep pace. Solution: The answer lies in dynamic, context-aware training powered by AI and LLMs. New platforms simulate phishing attempts that mirror the latest adversary tactics and coach employees in real time with a high degree of personalization. Innovators like Anagram, Dune, Fable, Hoxhunt, StrongestLayer, and more are redefining cyberawareness solutions. For energy and industrial operators, where even a single compromised account can disrupt grid operations or production, securing the human layer is as critical as ever. By turning awareness from a compliance checkbox into an adaptive defense, organizations fortify the "human perimeter" that underpins grid reliability, industrial safety, and the continuity of the energy transition. 3. Enterprise LLM usage and Data Security. Challenge: The rise of enterprise LLM adoption has unlocked new productivity but also introduced profound data risks. Employees may inadvertently paste proprietary information into external models or reach data through sanctioned AI systems that they were not supposed to have access to. Traditional Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) systems may fall short in cloud-native, AI-driven workflows. Sensitive IP, customer records, and trade secrets are at risk of exposure. Solution: Next-generation data security solutions are emerging to address this gap. Tools like Harmonic, BOLD, MIND, Orion, Sentra, Teleskope, among others, classify and monitor sensitive data in real time, enforce policies across distributed environments, or prevent leakage into external AI systems. For energy and industrial enterprises, protecting proprietary models, grid data, and end-user information is essential to system resilience. Companies deploying secure-by-design or private LLMs - augmented with these protective layers - can safely apply generative AI to myriad use cases from grid optimization to renewable project management without compromising operational security. By safeguarding intellectual property and critical data flows, these solutions don't just reduce cyber risk. They protect the digital backbone of the decarbonized energy economy. 4. Alert fatigue and the need for sophisticated, automated threat response. Challenge: Security Operations Centers (SOCs) face a deluge of alerts, with false positives overwhelming analysts. Most detection platforms struggle to separate anomalous activity from truly malicious threats, creating noise that delays incident response. Even smarter systems may not provide sufficient context to expedite security teams' work. As attack velocity increases, manual triage is no longer sustainable. Solution: Incorporating agentic AI to augment and empower SOC teams promises a step-change in resilience. By automating or simplifying lower level analyst tasks - such as alert triage, enrichment, and summarization - automation solutions can help reduce noise and accelerate time-to-response. Leading companies building the latest solutions include Exaforce, AirMDR, Conifers, Dropzone AI, Prophet, Qevlar AI, among others. In the energy sector, where downtime in a grid operator's network or an asset's control system can cascade across entire regions, faster detection and remediation directly equate to operational stability and financial performance. The result is a unified, adaptive defense layer capable of protecting both electrons, data, and production. From defense to digital resilience. Today, infrastructure resilience is inseparable from cybersecurity. As energy and industrials become more data-driven, decentralized, and AI enabled, their operations will hinge on innovative solutions that can defend against a growing field of malicious actors. From OT visibility and human-layer defense to AI model security and automated SOC operations, solutions are stepping in to reduce vulnerabilities and reinforce critical industries. The companies that endure will be those that treat security not as a brake on innovation, but as a prerequisite for operating at scale. As electrification and digitization reshape the economy, cybersecurity will play a decisive role in how quickly, and how safely, that transition moves forward.