Cyber crimes can doom a small business. A new Metro State effort in St. Paul hopes to help

The students will have bandwidth to serve 50 entities per year. For students that launch businesses, it lays the foundation of potential customer-client relationships, Kaleem said.

“This makes students qualified upon graduation, and helps them immediately build up their business on their own,” he said.

Renay Dossman, NDC’s chief executive, and Ben Johnson, NDC’s senior director of real estate, said the nonprofit will provide the students-turned-entrepreneurs with marketing, branding and business plan coaching, and as a community development financial institution, or CDFI, financing for business formation.

At a high level, the center helps retain tech talent that attracts investors interested in their new cyber defense companies, said Kyle Swanson, dean of the college of sciences at Metro State. And by creating an internet defense pipeline through the center, Metro State is adding diverse professionals to the cyber field, Kaleem said. Most students in Metro State’s cyber program are women and people of color, he said.

“This can help grow that by building a tech ecosystem around the defense economy,” he said.