Our history
Brightsight is a spin-off from TNO, the Netherlands organisation for applied scientific research. TNO was formed in the 1930's by the Dutch government to be an intermediate research and development institute between government, universities and industry.

In 1975 security evaluation activities were started within a unit called EIB (Evaluation centre for security techniques). This unit was involved in security evaluation activities, mainly focusing on IT security products from the payment industries, like IC's, chip cards and PIN entry devices. In 1997 another unit within TNO developed the capability of performing Common Criteria evaluations. This activity was spun off in 2001 to form a separate company under TNO. On January 1, 2004, both groups merged to form TNO ITSEF BV.

Our name change
Since TNO is also involved in security activities, it was jointly decided to change the company name in order to express more explicitly that we are a separate company and to avoid confusion. The new name that was chosen is “Brightsight”.

Currently Brightsight is a very successful organisation, it has some 40 employees, has an annual turnover over 4 Million Euro, it is one of the largest security evaluation laboratories in the world and it is in possession of  all relevant internationally recognized security evaluation accreditations. Brightsight can count some 100 international clients to its customer base, most of which have been clients over a decade.