After owning the podium at the Innovacorp entrepreneurship competitions this year, Jim DeLeskie is now turning his attention to business development of his cyber-security company, with a special focus on Japan.

DeLeskie is the CEO of Heimdall Networks, the Sydney-based winner of the 2014 I-3 Technology Startup Competition, Innovacorp’s event that aims to find the best new startups in Nova Scotia.

The company, whose software battles distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks, captured $225,000 at I-3, as the overall winner, the winner for the Cape Breton region and as the top IT company in the event.

Then this week, Innovacorp revealed that Shout!, a social media platform developed by DeLeskie and business partner Daniel Faria, won $50,000 in the Spark Cape Breton competition. It was one of six companies that shared $200,000 in the Spark contest.

But DeLeskie’s attention now is focused on growing the business of Heimdall and using the I-3 victory as a stepping-stone to a broader customer base.

“The biggest thing about the I-3 win is we’ve had more outward attention,” said DeLeskie in an interview. “We’ve actually leveraged it (the win) in our Japanese discussions because it validates what we’ve been saying.”

Heimdall began two years ago and has grown with the assistance of more than $1 million in angel financing. The company’s software provides a cure for a huge pain point as DDoS attacks have plagued more governments, companies and organizations in the past few years.

These attacks swamp an organization’s website and/or network with unwanted traffic, disabling all its online functions. They have become more frequent and powerful because of the development and distribution of relatively simple tools needed to make the attacks.

Having grown to 13 employees, Heimdall has developed its product to protect companies and organizations from DDOS attacks and is now developing its sales team to gain traction.

DeLeskie figures that half the company’s revenues will come from North America, primarily in the U.S. And he wants Japan to be one of the prime markets. It is a huge, tech-savvy economy and it is a unified market with most corporations headquartered in Tokyo. The centralized location there makes it a more attractive market than Europe, which is fragmented among so many countries and cities.

“If we can get some real traction in Japan, it would allow us to capture a big market share in one major economy,” he said.

The company has already initiated its sales campaign in Japan and elsewhere, DeLeskie said. It is “talking with two of the largest telecom companies in the world” in Japan.

Heimdall is also in the final stages of beta-tests with two potential customers, one in the U.S. and the other in Canada.

The focus for the company in 2014 is to bolster the sales efforts and begin to attract paying customers.

“This year we’re expecting to see our first revenue,” said DeLeskie. “So we’re getting about six or so people on board to develop our sales force.”