Socure co-founder back in CEO role for next digital identity verification growth phase

Socure Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Johnny Ayers is being elevated to the CEO position by the company to lead its growth in the KYC, biometric document verification and fraud reduction markets.

Current CEO Tom Thimot is leaving after just over two years with Socure to pursue other endeavors.

Ayers has been a main reason for the growth of Socure’s customer base to include four of the five top U.S. banks and eight of the top 10 card issuers, according to the announcement, as well as the market fit of the company’s products.

Ayers thanked Thimot for his leadership and credited him with laying the groundwork for Socure’s next growth phase.

“When I joined, Socure was a promising startup,” Thimot comments in the announcement. “I was brought in to help make it a great company, and I am so proud to say we have done just that. In my time as CEO, we together built a world class, diverse team, added hundreds of customers, and increased the company valuation significantly. I also had the privilege of spending a lot of time working with and mentoring Johnny. Now it is time to pass the baton. As the original co-founder, Johnny is poised to take Socure to the next level by offering the right products and penetrating the right markets so that Socure is truly built to last.”

Unit21, meanwhile, has partnered with Socure to enable real-time identity verification through the Socure platform, Marketing Technology News writes.

Customers can use Socure ID+ with Unit21’s engine for onboarding workflow to significantly increase onboarding speed and increase customer loyalty, reduce friction for legitimate customers, and block more fraud attempts. Socure’s “Day Zero” digital identity verification combines with Unit21’s no-code approach to enable customers to easily create complex decisioning workflows, according to the report.

Unit21 recently raised $13 million in a Series A funding round to build out its flexible transaction monitoring rules engine and case management system.

Socure recently launched a solution for omnichannel biometrics and ID document verification.

BrainChip appoint new director

BrainChip has appointed Todd Viera as Director of Technical Sales, in which role he will focus on strategic customer adoption and implementation of the company’s Akida neuromorphic processor in a range of industries.

The company is targeting aerospace, autonomous vehicle, medicine and cybersecurity applications, and smart edge devices like sensors and cameras. Facial recognition, gesture recognition and sound detection are among the applications the Akida Neuromorphic System-on-Chip, Akida Development Environment and related IP are being used for.

Viera brings more than 25 years of experience in engineering and technical sales expertise related to chip design, electronic design automation, and intellectual property. Most recently he was director of field sales engineers at ARM.

“As AI/ML processing evolves, there are more and more applications and industries where BrainChip’s technology can be deployed, and that is both an opportunity for the company and for all of society,” comments Vierra. “I am thrilled and proud to join a company that is enabling new innovations in science, healthcare, transportation, security, defense, and more.”

BrainChip Founder and CTO Peter van der Made will present a talk on brain-inspired applications, including face biometrics, at the Brain Inspired Computing Congress. These applications are based on event-based neural networks trained by BrainChip with spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP).

The Brain Inspired Computing Congress will be held on November 18 and 19, 2020, as a virtual event.

“Unlike conventional artificial intelligence networks, event-based processing is capable of continuous incremental learning and can adapt to new information. This capability can result in a superior standard of ‘intelligence’ and more closely resembles the human brain,” says van der Made. “BrainChip’s work in event-based neural processing is paving the way for these brain inspired applications in commercial and beneficial AI.”

Van der Made published a book titled ‘Higher Intelligence: How to Create a Functional Artificial Brain’ in 2013.

ID.me hiring 1,000 to support explosive growth

ID.me has announced plans to hire more than 1,000 new employees for its Northern Virginia offices by the end of 2021, local outlet WTOP reports, following explosive growth during the pandemic as processes requiring identification move online.

The positions the company is hiring for include engineering, customer support, sales and marketing jobs.

The hiring spree represents a major change for the company, which currently has around 350 employees.

ID.me is based in McLean, Virginia, and has two new offices in Tysons.

Article Topics

AI  |  appointments  |  biometrics  |  BrainChip  |  digital identity  |  ID.me  |  Socure