TAMPA, Fla.: ReliaQuest today announced a $1.5 million investment to expand AI cybersecurity research and education at the University of South Florida’s College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing. The gift will establish the college’s first-ever endowed professorship and create a new study track within the ReliaQuest Labs program focused on artificial intelligence-supported software engineering.

“Cybersecurity is the greatest technical challenge of our generation, and with AI reshaping the threat landscape, it’s only getting more complex. That just creates even more opportunity for talented individuals to enter this industry,” said ReliaQuest founder and CEO Brian Murphy. “Our partnership with USF has always been about making sure students graduate ready to seize that opportunity, and this investment helps do that on a broader scale."

The ReliaQuest AI and Cybersecurity Professorship will help attract and retain top faculty talent and support research in AI cybersecurity. The gift also expands the longtime ReliaQuest Labs experiential learning program at USF, strengthening the college’s ability to attract top talent and prepare workforce-ready graduates.

The ReliaQuest Labs program was established in 2018 to provide students with hands-on experience that complements the in-class curriculum. More than 300 USF students have graduated from the Labs program since its inception, with the vast majority accepting jobs at ReliaQuest or other leading cybersecurity employers. This new gift adds a second track in AI-enabled software engineering to the existing cybersecurity operations focus.

“ReliaQuest’s support enables USF to expand cutting‑edge research and education in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity by attracting exceptional faculty members,” said Sudeep Sarkar, launch dean and professor at the college. “The ReliaQuest Labs provide a powerful experiential learning environment, one of the core pillars of our academic mission, where students engage directly with real‑world challenges and translate research and innovation into impact. ”The new track will center on software engineering and emerging areas such as prompt engineering, aligning with growing industry demand in AI-driven security and preparing students for evolving workforce needs.

“This transformative gift enhances USF’s hands-on learning opportunities for students while supporting USF’s efforts to attract and retain world-class faculty in critical and rapidly evolving fields,” said USF President Moez Limayem. “I am grateful that we have been able to strengthen an already amazing partnership with one of the most forward-looking companies in our nation.”

About ReliaQuest

ReliaQuest is an agentic AI cybersecurity company whose platform, GreyMatter, serves as the Agentic Defense for the enterprise - defending organizations against AI-accelerated attacks. Any defender can harness that AI to detect threats, run investigations, execute response, and hunt across their entire tech stack in plain language without requiring any tool expertise. GreyMatter makes this possible through three capabilities: the Universal Translator, which automatically normalizes telemetry across any vendor without data centralization; Detection at Source, at Storage, or in Transit, which catches threats where data lives or as it moves before it is ever indexed, parsed, or stored; and Agentic Orchestration, which combines a natural language operating layer, multiple autonomous agentic systems, and an AI Model Broker that continuously selects the best model for every task based on speed, cost, and accuracy. GreyMatter enables organizations to re-architect their security environment for speed, efficiency, and cost control. ReliaQuest has been making security possible since 2007.

About the University of South Florida

The University of South Florida is a top-ranked research university serving approximately 50,000 students from across the globe at campuses in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota-Manatee and USF Health. In 2025, U.S. News & World Report recognized USF with its highest overall ranking in university history, as a top 50 public university for the seventh consecutive year and as one of the top 15 best values among all public universities in the nation. U.S. News also ranks the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine in the highest tier, placing it as one of the top 16 medical schools in the nation and inside the top 10 among public universities. USF is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), a group that includes only the top 3% of universities in the U.S. With an all-time high of $750 million in research funding in 2025 and as a top 20 public university for producing U.S. patents, USF uses innovation to transform lives and shape a better future. The university generates an annual economic impact of nearly $10 billion for the state of Florida. USF’s Division I athletics teams compete in the American Conference. Learn more at www.usf.edu.

Fonte: Business Wire