The first personal crypto security solution.
With over $2B+ in crypto assets lost or stolen in the last two years alone, crypto investors need a simple and easy-to-use solution that offers them crypto security that works. Harnessing a customer’s trusted personal network, crypto assets are encrypted with powerful algorithms, and distributed to a mesh of mobile devices, dramatically reducing risk, as there is no single point of storage on a cloud or on a local device. This is personal crypto security.
Our Team
Vault12 has assembled a group of security and cryptography team members who work in Silicon Valley, New York and around the world to bring much-needed innovations to protecting cryptocurrency and delivering new decentralized digital custody, today.
Leadership Team
Max Skibinsky
Max Skibinsky is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and startup mentor. Most recently, Max was an investment partner with Andreessen Horowitz, where he focused on enterprise security and bitcoin and deals with Tanium, TradeBlock and Digital Ocean. In addition to co-founding Vault12, Max leads the R&D team.
Before that Max was the founder and CEO of Hive7, a social entertainment company that became part of The Walt Disney Company. In 2003, Max joined newly formed Voltage Security, an encryption startup incubated at Stanford University, where he architected and designed an Identity-Based Encryption messaging system that was showcased at DEMO '04. Voltage was acquired by Hewlett Packard in 2015. Max has also advised and invested in many startups graduating from Y Combinator including Eligible, Transcriptic and ZenPayroll. Max graduated with masters' degrees in theoretical and mathematical physics from Moscow State University.
Blake Commagere
Blake is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and an advisor to several companies in the SF Bay Area. He has started seven companies and sold five of them. He regularly gives talks on subjects including Growth Hacking, Fundraising, and Psychology Management.
He created the social gaming category by building some of the biggest apps ever (over 50 Million players) on Facebook, including the iconic games Zombies, Vampires, and Werewolves. Blake also wrote and designed the first version of Causes on Facebook, which has over 120 Million users and has raised over $100 million for various charities. Blake graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Rice University.
Brandon Forant
Brandon is a creative director and product designer with experience consulting for Fortune 500 companies and startups. He has experience with cybersecurity, enterprise trading, and personal banking.
Brandon was the co-founder of Alchemy50, a Brooklyn-based product design firm. A50 was acquired in 2017 and their clients included United Healthcare, Dataminr, and Betterment. He has also designed security products for Comcast, trading platforms at Reuters, and advised on autonomous banking initiatives at Citi. Brandon graduated with a Bachelor of Science Degree in graphics design communication from Philadelphia University.
Wasim Ahmad
Wasim is a serial entrepreneur with five exits, and an advisor in the fields of AI, the blockchain, cryptocurrency, and encryption solutions. At Vault12, he led the private and public fundraising - one of the world’s first STOs and focuses today on expanding the Vault12 ecosystem. His crypto experience began with AlphaPoint, where he worked with the founding team to launch the world’s first crypto trading exchanges.
Previously he was a founding member of Voltage Security, a spinout from Stanford University, that launched Identity-Based Encryption (IBE), a breakthrough in Public Key Cryptography, and pioneered the use of sophisticated data encryption to protect sensitive data across the world’s payment systems. Wasim serves as chair of non-profit, StartOut New York, and is a Seedcamp and WeWork Labs global mentor. Wasim graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and French from the University of Sussex.
Investors
Naval Ravikant
Navalis an entrepreneur and angel investor, a co-author of Venture Hacks, and a co-maintainer of AngelList.
Previously he was a co-founder at Genoa Corp (acquired by Finisar), Epinions.com (IPO via Shopping.com), and Vast.com (largest white-label classifieds marketplace). I’ve also advised Bix.com, iPivot, and XFire, among others, and invested in many companies, including Twitter, FourSquare, DocVerse (sold to Google), Mixer Labs (sold to Twitter), Jambool (sold to Google), SnapLogic, PlanCast, Stack Overflow, Heyzap, and Disqus.
Advisors
Jarrod Dicker
Jarrod Dicker is an entrepreneurial technology and media executive. He is currently at the Washington Post and the Chairman of Po.et, a platform for a new decentralized media economy. Prior to Po.et, Dicker served as innovation chief at the Washington Post as Vice President of Innovation and founded RED, the Post's research experimentation, and development team. There he oversaw the companies technology, product, operations, and strategy across the entire business.
Before the Washington Post, Dicker lead strategy, product, and technology teams at RebelMouse, Time Inc., and the Huffington Post. He also sits on the Board of Advisors for Rutgers University School of Innovation and Mogul Inc., a technology platform that enables women worldwide to share ideas and access content based on personal interests. Dicker's writing and work have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, AdAge, AdWeek, Digiday, Axios, AdExchanger, Poynter and more.
Sathvik Krishnamurthy
Sathvik Krishnamurthy is a serial tech entrepreneur and an expert on cybersecurity and crypto. He has been on the management team of two IPOs (Worldtalk, Valicert) and most recently was CEO of Voltage Security for over a decade which was acquired by HP in 2015.
He has since been an active angel investor and board member/advisor, working with multiple companies including Entrust Datacard (Board of Directors), Callsign (investor/advisor), ScanTrust (investor/advisor), Stealth Security (investor/advisor), CHITA (acquired by Medidata), Fortscale (Board of Directors, acquired by Dell/RSA), and Earn.com (formerly 21.co; investor/advisor, acquired by Coinbase).
Beryl Li
Beryl is involved in the OTC crypto asset space and has been trading cryptocurrency since late 2013. She is the founder and CEO of CapchainX, the first crypto equity tokenization platform to create, manage and transfer asset tokens on the blockchain. She was a founding team member and Entrepreneur In Residence at Coins.ph, a leading crypto exchange and blockchain payments startup in Asia. Her experience includes FX Quants at Blackrock, London backtesting trading algorithms for a consulting project. She was Senior Consultant at the Department of ICT authoring the Philippine Roadmap for Digital Startups, a framework in building the local startup ecosystem. She started her career in early-stage VC, SeedAsia, in 2012.
Beryl holds a Master of Finance degree from Cambridge University where she sat as President of the Cambridge University Cryptocurrency Society. She attended Stanford University earning an International Management Certificate during the Summer Session and earned her bachelors in International Business, Finance, and Economics at Manchester University.
Matt Pauker
Company builder, advisor, investor
Matt Pauker is a serial company builder with almost two decades of experience in cryptography. He most recently co-founded 21, one of the earliest and best-funded blockchain companies. Previously, he co-founded enterprise encryption & key management company Voltage Security (acquired by HP) out of his Stanford dorm room.
Matt is an active early-stage investor and currently serves as an advisor to a number of venture-backed startups, including Abra, uBiome, and Penrose Studios. He is the author of more than two dozen cryptography, security, and payments patents and was a key contributor to the development of several NIST & IETF security standards. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Crypto Advisors
Vinny Lingham
Vinny is a serial entrepreneur who previously founded the digital gift card platform, Gyft, which was acquired by First Data Corporation in 2014. After over a decade of experience in e-commerce, he realized that no-one had a universal solution to tackle identity fraud for consumers.
Dr. Yevgeniy Dodis
Professor of Cryptography, NYU
Yevgeniy Dodis is a Professor of computer science at New York University. Dr. Dodis received his summa cum laude Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from New York University in 1996, and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from MIT in 2000. Dr. Dodis was a post-doc at IBM T.J. Watson Research center in 2000 and joined New York University as an Assistant Professor in 2001. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2007 and Full Professor in 2012.
Dr. Dodis' research is primarily in cryptography and network security. In particular, he worked in a variety of areas including random number generation, leakage-resilient cryptography, cryptography under weak randomness, cryptography with biometrics and other noisy data, hash function and block cipher design, protocol composition and information-theoretic cryptography. Dr. Dodis has more than 130 scientific publications at various conferences, journals, and other venues.
Terrence Spies
erence Spies has over 19 years of security and systems software development experience, working with leading companies such as Microsoft, Asta Networks, and others. Terence served as Chief Technology Officer for Voltage Security, architecting innovations in cryptography, identity-based encryption, and format-preserving encryption. After the acquisition of Voltage by HPE, Terence became CTO.
Before joining Voltage, Terence worked at Asta Networks as Director of Development and VP of Engineering. Before Asta, Terence was with Microsoft for almost nine years where he started the public key cryptography group and led the development of Microsoft Crypto API. While at Microsoft, Terence also designed the SSL server and client side implementations for Microsoft Internet Explorer, participated in the PCT/TLS protocol design, led the development team for the Microsoft Certificate Server and led the integration of the certificate server and active directory.
Terence is active within the standards community and currently serves as chair of X9F1, the Cryptographic Tools group of X9 whose charter is to draft cryptographic algorithm standards for use in the financial industry. Terence graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon University.
Roman Storm
Roman Storm is an expert in de-centralized app development and an experienced software architect. Through his work at Amazon and other leading organizations, he has built up a repertoire of skills focused on the technologies that make up the new crypto-currency ecosystem and the world of the blockchain.
As an expert Solidity developer at Blockchainlabs.nz he consulted on various ICO projects. Then in 2017 he developed and launched the POA consensus protocol and went on in 2018 to launch the first interoperability protocol for Ethereum systems. At POA Network he manages teams working on ethereum ecosystem tools.
Timeline
Vault12 app with VGT and ETH peer to peer payments available for download.
Vault12 launches at San Francisco Blockchain Week, download from iOS and Android App Store
Vault12 Trial Edition available in iOS and Android app stores.
Vault12 Universal Beta available for both iOS and Android.
Community Rewards program introduced.
Transaction Split Proposal Approved by Blockchain Community Vote
Vault12 Beta released
VGT Token Generation completed.
Smart Contract Security Audit Report completed by PepperSec.
Alpha release of Vault12 app.
Public Security Token Offering goes live
Vault12 Private STO commences
Vault12 releases white paper outlining project, distributed security network, token economics and live demo of Vault12 app.
Alpha build of Vault12 mobile app for IOS goes live on Vault12 Secure Relay Network.
First version of Vault12 Secure Relay released for community review.
Vault12 is formed to solve the problem of distributed, secure crypto-assets storage
Available Jobs
Starting with humble beginnings in the worlds of security, gaming, and design, Max Skibinsky and Blake Commagere realized there was an overlap of these sectors with the singularly powerful emergence of decentralized technology.
At the same time it became clear that for a new class of crypto investor, security solutions were sorely lacking, thus the idea for Vault12 was born.
Three years on, Vault12 has assembled a group of security, cryptography, and design team members who work in Silicon Valley, New York and around the world, in a highly decentralized fashion.
