Tech Pioneer and Gulf War Veteran is Daon’s New President and CPO

A seasoned tech entrepreneur has been named as Daon‘s new President and Chief Product Officer, and has joined the firm’s Board of Directors.

Ralph Rodriguez brings to the role a truly impressive resume. He founded multiple companies including Blue Hill Research, Delfigo Security, Invenio, and NTA, and in 2015 he co-founded Confirm.io, a specialist in document reading and identity verification, where he served as CTO until it was acquired by Facebook in 2018. At that point, he became one of the Silicon Valley giant’s research scientists, serving the role from a Cambridge, MA, office for one year and eight months. He has 23 US patents and international patent applications to his name.

“Ralph has repeatedly distinguished himself as a very successful tech entrepreneur,” commented Daon CEO Tom Grissen. “As the longest-serving Fellow at MIT, Ralph pioneered research on AI, cloud, mobile, neural science and security technologies at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) departments.”

Rodriguez’s track record outside of the tech world is also striking. He served in the US Army during the first Gulf War, after being named Soldier of the Year by the 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry) in 1987. And since departing Facebook, the latter part of Rodriguez’s career has been spent in private equity, as an Executive-in-Residence for Summit Partners.

He’ll bring all that experience and expertise to bear in his newly created position with Daon, one of the earliest pioneers of mobile biometrics. Daon’s IdentityX solution was one of the very first to leverage the sensors of a standard smartphone to enable user authentication, and was quickly embraced by the financial services sector in particular. It remains an important component of Daon’s portfolio, which now also includes the VeriFLY health passport app and, as of this year, a low-code web app SDK enabling third party organizations to integrate Daon’s biometric onboarding technology into their own apps.

“Daon is a market leader in its domain and it’s a privilege to join the company at this critical stage of its growth curve – as it rapidly expands into new markets and verticals,” said Rodriguez. “In the past five years, my focus was around multi-modal biometrics and authentication. And based on my observations, Daon is best-in-class in delivering these solutions.”

Rodriguez went on to assert that his goal is help the company continue to grow its business and expand internationally.

–

June 17, 2022 – by Alex Perala