A government-backed scheme to provide support to cybersecurity start-ups has signed up 15 new members, including an artificial intelligence company and a business which scours the deep web for leaked passwords.

The London Office for Rapid Cybersecurity Advancement (LORCA) opened last year with £13.5m in funding from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport.

The organisation, run by the Plexal innovation centre in the Olympic Park, gives companies access to experts from Deloitte and The Centre for Secure Information Technologies at Queen’s University Belfast.

New businesses joining the scheme include Threat Status, which analyses the hidden deep web in order to track stolen usernames and passwords.

Another business joining the scheme is Elemendar, which uses artificial intelligence to convert lengthy cybersecurity reports into a format which can be read by computers and added into databases.