NTT Research used Upgrade 2026 to launch Scale Academy, a new incubator focused on turning internal research into products and services, and introduced SaltGrain, its first security platform built on attribute-based encryption.

I am covering Upgrade 2026, NTT Research’s annual event, taking place April 15-16 at the Signia by Hilton San Jose. For more information on the event itself, read my earlier article.

Scale Academy

Scale Academy is the structure NTT Research is using to move selected technologies out of NTT Research labs and broader NTT R&D into commercialization. NTT Research has operated since 2019 with a focus on basic research, but after seven years, some of its technologies have advanced enough to support product development and business incubation.

The new group is led by Bennett Indart, NTT Research’s SVP of Product Innovation. Its role is to identify promising technologies, incubate them, develop market positioning, build partnerships, and prepare them for launch. The model also opens the door to outside partnerships and outside investment, a broader approach than NTT’s more internal development style.

“Taking basic research, theory, papers, and patents and turning them into something people actually want to use in their daily lives is another challenge altogether,” said Bennett Indart, Senior Vice President of Product Innovation at NTT Research.

Scale Academy will start by working with technologies developed inside NTT rather than operating as an outside accelerator. SaltGrain is already on a spinout path, and NTT Research plans to manage the process with milestones and funding gates as it builds a repeatable commercialization model.

“There will be milestones, there will be funding gates, and if we can’t reach those, then hard decisions will have to be made,” said Indart.

The first product to emerge from Scale Academy is SaltGrain, a zero-trust data security suite for enterprises handling high-value or regulated information. It is built on attribute-based encryption, or ABE, a cryptographic scheme first introduced in a 2004 paper co-authored by UCLA’s Dr. Amit Sahai and Dr. Brent Waters, now director of NTT Research’s Cryptography and Information Security Lab. The name combines “Salt,” which references stronger hash-based security, with “Grain,” which reflects ABE’s granular approach to data access control.

NTT Research has been developing the commercial path for ABE over several years. The company presented use cases for the technology at Upgrade 2024, moved to several prototypes last year, and is now using Scale Academy to accelerate SaltGrain’s commercialization.

SaltGrain

SaltGrain attaches access policy directly to encrypted data. That means protection stays with the data throughout its lifecycle, rather than relying solely on perimeter defenses or broad file-level permissions. The platform is designed for environments where data moves across organizations, teams, systems, and AI-driven workflows.

“No matter where the data goes, the protection and access control go with it throughout the data lifecycle. Even if the bad actor hacked through the system-based protection and could steal the data, the data is still protected. The data becomes useless,” said Fang Wu, Vice President of Business Development at NTT Research.

SaltGrain enables more granular control over access to sensitive portions of documents and data. It is intended to support secure sharing of text, image, and video files while protecting specific content inside them. The platform is aimed at organizations in sectors such as financial services, healthcare, government, and large technology environments, where collaboration is necessary but the cost of a data breach can be high.

A major part of the product’s relevance is the rise of AI. As more AI systems and agents gain access to enterprise documents and data, the attack surface expands. SaltGrain is designed to protect data at the data layer itself, which is increasingly important when information is being shared for analysis, automation, and machine-driven workflows.

NTT Research is also positioning SaltGrain for AI-agent workflows, where enterprises may need to give AI systems access to large document sets that also contain private or regulated information. The platform is designed to help protect both the input data used by those systems and the outputs they generate.

“As those documents may contain a great deal of private information, SaltGrain will play an important role in protecting that data,” said Kazu Gomi, President and CEO of NTT Research.

The platform is also built for post-quantum deployment. NTT Research has advanced the underlying ABE implementation to operate with post-quantum security while maintaining strong performance. That gives SaltGrain a role not just in current enterprise security, but also in longer-term cryptographic planning as organizations prepare for a quantum era.

SaltGrain is also being developed so users do not have to manage the complexity of the underlying cryptography directly. An AI-enabled data classification engine is part of the platform direction, helping enterprises locate sensitive data and determine how it should be protected. That matters because many organizations still do not know exactly where their most sensitive information resides.

NTT Research has previously licensed ABE within the NTT group, leading to multiple proofs of concept. Scale Academy is now consolidating those efforts into a single incubation path to push the technology further toward market adoption.

For more information on Scale Academy, visit NTT Research’s dedicated page or attend Upgrade 2026, NTT’s two-day event in San Jose, where the company is highlighting how scientific discoveries and advanced concepts are moving toward real-world products and systems. The event includes keynotes, panel sessions, and an expo with more than 30 exhibits from NTT companies around the world.

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