LDC Top 50 2021

Few people have made a bigger impact on technology than Andrew Bud CBE FREng. But he believes his work on nuclear fusion and his pioneering inventions within mobile telecoms will pale in comparison to the achievements of his latest business, iProov.

Launched in 2013, the company uses its patented authentication Flashmark technology to create identity assurance that works on any personal device. He says: “Our vision is to keep people safe when they use their digital identities worldwide across every sector of online activity in every moment of their lives. I think we can get there within seven years.”

Q&A

What are your ambitions for iProov?

I want us to create trust in people online, everywhere. A decade ago, I aimed to scale our architecture to a billion users. That lacked ambition. We’ll go well beyond that.

How did you come to create this business?

I studied engineering at Cambridge and was an engineer until I was 35; I worked on nuclear fusion technologies at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy and  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). That was my first love, but the industry was too slow for me, so I got involved in the microprocessor revolution with PA Technology.

I helped to create the world’s first digital wireless telephone in 1989, the first wireless LAN in Europe in 1993 and went on to help found the first private mobile network in Italy, Omnitel Pronto-Italia. I then moved from technology into management. My last business, mBlox, became the world’s largest processor of mobile payments in 2007. But when fraudsters started to use our network, I decided to solve that problem and built iProov.

What challenge have you overcome?

The challenge for any entrepreneur is to keep their business alive until the world catches up. In one way, we have been lucky because the online ecosystem has accelerated at pace and our customers are major organisations that need to be at the cutting edge of technology.  We’re the world’s largest provider of genuine presence assurance.