KnuEdge veteran Kate Dilligan to lead KnuVerse product development

Neural technology company KnuEdge announced last week that Kate Dilligan has added general manager to her executive vice president title at KnuVerse to lead the development of the voice authentication division’s product suite. Dilligan shepherded KnuEdge and KnuVerse’s enterprise relationships through their early testing and development phases, and will oversee the extension of targeted solutions to specific enterprise partner problems into commercial offerings for the enterprise security market.

Dilligan was the first employee of the ten year startup, which was founded by former NASA head Dan Goldin and exited stealth earlier this year. The corporate structure of KnuEdge has evolved from its founding, and it has been reorganized over the past couple of years into distinct business units for voice and chip technologies, with KnuEdge as corporate parent.

“Technology in and of itself does not do anything; it is only useful if it solves a problem. This philosophy is one Kate has employed as she helped grow KnuVerse from an idea to the current products,” said Goldin, who currently serves as CEO of KnuEdge. “Kate challenges her teams to think differently, which is motivated by her own inherent interest in transforming how humans interact with machines. In this new position, she will continue elevating the voice authentication market, bringing its power to new industries and verticals.”

Dilligan told Biometric Update in an interview that KnuVerse will offer on-premise and cloud authentication products for internal enterprise use to begin with. KnuVerse is working with companies in financial services, health care, and single sign-on solutions, according to Dilligan. Continued development will eventually extend the company’s portfolio to include customer-facing products and other verticals.

A pair of financial services companies, retirement finance firm TIAA and Barclays, recently introduced voice authentication for customers.

“Our differentiator is our performance in real-world conditions,” said Dilligan. “From our military-grade authentication, we’ve been battle-tested. We’re starting to talk to users and providers in the IoT space, who have increasingly complex noise conditions, and increasingly short voice commands that they want us to authenticate around, and that’s where we’re pushing our products to go next.”

One of Dilligan’s first tasks in her new role will be overseeing a significant portfolio relaunch in October, including KnuVerse’s cloud product, an enhanced user experience, and refreshed APIs. Meanwhile, work continues on fine-tuning the company’s core authentication products for demanding IoT conditions. The company will also soon relaunch its website.

To get all this work done, Dilligan also said that KnuVerse will be hiring in the coming weeks, expressing confidence in her team’s ability to improve the company by adding sales and business development, engineering, and research talent.

“Internally, we’re growing. We’re really looking to the future, as to what are next steps are, and next product offerings to expand our portfolio to be a provider of absolutely outstanding speech recognition technologies to our customers.”

KnuVerse hosted a hackathon in July which handed out awards to developers of a range of different kinds of apps, including a game, encrypted chat and notes, and hotel room IoT access.

With a wave of launches, relaunches, and hiring slated for next month, and an increasingly public drive to stake territory in an emerging area of the enterprise security market, the pressure will be on Dilligan as the measure of the company’s success shifts towards revenue.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  Kate Dilligan  |  KnuEdge  |  security  |  voice authentication