When a cybersecurity company moves its international operations to a new city and immediately hires a local university student as its first employee, it signals more than just corporate expansion—it shows how tightly industry and academia can feed each other. WitFoo, a security operations software firm, has offered a Junior Software Engineer role to University of Canterbury student Dylan Costello, whose final-year project the company sponsored, and announced it will double its project sponsorships at the university from two to four in 2027, while also funding a new PhD scholarship in computer science.
The offer makes Costello WitFoo’s first Christchurch-based employee as the company relocates its international commercial operations to the city. Costello’s sponsored project tackled a technical challenge for the company: designing a way for WitFoo’s Analytics platform to run as a coordinated cluster across multiple machines. “Having a project that comes from a real industry challenge helps cement a lot of the concepts taught at UC, while meeting with Charles regularly allowed me to better understand the organisational needs and constraints, and what problems I will actually need to solve,” Costello said. “I was very lucky to be given this chance, and for the offer to continue working with WitFoo in Christchurch. This project has been a great way to finish off my degree.”
WitFoo Chairman and co-Founder Charles Herring framed the move in broader terms for the city’s ambitions. “Christchurch has been the Garden City for more than a century. I believe it is in a great position to become a garden city of innovation that could one day compete with Silicon Valley, and the potential to get there already exists inside the University of Canterbury,” Herring said.
A second sponsored student, Matthew Schwartfeger, worked on benchmarking caching and mapping strategies to accelerate graph processing in WitFoo’s Analytics platform while keeping memory usage predictable. “This project has been a good opportunity to take performance optimisation beyond a single algorithm and look at how it applies to a larger system,” Schwartfeger said. “It’s been interesting to see how choices around caching and mapping strategies affect both performance and memory usage in a real production application.”
A third student, Ben Irvine, took a different path by working with WitFoo’s open data rather than a direct sponsorship. He evaluated research provenance-graph intrusion detection systems using the Precinct 6 Cybersecurity Dataset, which WitFoo created alongside UC’s Computer Science and Software Engineering department. “Over the project I suggested ways the dataset could better reflect the environments these systems would actually run in, including having attacks sit naturally among the normal activity around them,” Irvine said. “WitFoo checked and acted on every suggestion, rebuilding the dataset and making it possible to evaluate these systems on real operational data.”
Associate Professor Etienne Borde, who coordinates the department’s software engineering research projects course with industry partners, emphasized the mutual value of these collaborations. “Real industry problems, with real code, real data, and real stakeholders, give students an authentic experience. This year’s projects show what our students can achieve, and the benefit flows both ways and extends beyond the technical results of each project,” Borde said.
WitFoo first attended UC’s project showcase as a guest in 2025, then sponsored its first two projects this year. The company is now committing to sponsor four projects in 2027 and has pledged funding for a PhD scholarship in computer science at UC, expected to begin that same year. Herring praised the students’ work directly: “The work Dylan, Matthew and Ben delivered would hold its own in any engineering team I have led. That is a credit to them, and to the UC academics who gave them rigour, room and real support. It is why we are doubling our commitment.”
The partnership has also stretched across faculty boundaries. After an introduction from Borde, WitFoo and Dr Chat Le Nguyen of UC’s Faculty of Law have started exploring interdisciplinary research into the legal questions around sharing cybersecurity evidence—ranging from privacy concerns to how machine-generated evidence might be used by Police and the courts.
Martin Cudd, General Manager of Innovation and Business Growth at ChristchurchNZ, the city’s economic development agency, pointed to the broader regional impact. “Christchurch’s tech sector grows when our university and our companies work this closely together. When a UC student’s final-year project turns into a job offer from a company that has chosen to move here, that is exactly the story Ōtautahi wants to tell,” Cudd said.
Media are invited to the UC CSSE Final Year Project Showcase 2026 on Friday 16 October, 9am to 6pm, at Novotel Christchurch Cathedral Square. Irvine presents at 10:30am, and Costello and Schwartfeger present from 2:30pm to 3:30pm. For interviews with Herring, contact press@witfoo.com; for UC staff and students, contact UC Media at media@canterbury.ac.nz.
About WitFoo
WitFoo builds security operations software that reads all of an organisation’s security data, reduces telemetry volumes by more than 90% without losing evidence, and shares what it finds with the people who must act on it, from analysts and boards to law enforcement. Founded in 2016, WitFoo, Inc. is headquartered in Dunwoody, Georgia, and sells its Conductor, Analytics and Reporter products through channel partners. Its New Zealand subsidiary, WitFoo Limited, is based at 47 Salisbury Street in Christchurch Central, where the company is building its international commercial operations. Cybersecurity for Collective Defense.
About the University of Canterbury
Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury (UC), established in 1873, is a research university in Christchurch. Its Te Tari Pūhanga Pūmanawa Rorohiko | Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering conducts research across cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, software engineering and human-computer interaction.
Working with UC gives our partners access to new thinking, advanced research, nationally benchmarked infrastructure and exceptional talent. Whether companies are tackling complex challenges, exploring new opportunities, or shaping the future of their sector, UC makes it easy to link directly to expertise and capabilities via our new Research Connect portal.
Michael Riforgiate
WitFoo, Inc.
+1 678-203-9800
press@witfoo.com
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Why it matters: This partnership shows how cybersecurity companies can build local talent pipelines by investing directly in university research projects—and the benefits extend beyond hiring. When a firm like WitFoo doubles its sponsorship and adds a PhD scholarship, it signals that hands-on, industry-backed education is becoming a competitive advantage for both the company and the city trying to grow its tech sector.
