Management

Prior to being appointed CEO of the company in 2006, Rémy de Tonnac was a Venture Partner at Vertex Venture Capital in London. He represented Vertex within numerous technology companies in the firm's portfolio and served as Chairman of the Supervisory Board from 2002 to 2006. Previous to that, Rémy fulfilled several management roles at Gemplus, having joined the smart card provider at its formation in 1987. He initially oversaw sales and marketing operations in France, before becoming Chief Executive Officer for the Asia-Pacific region from 1992 to 1999, a position that was based in Singapore. He then moved to San Francisco to fulfill the same function for the Americas region. He was also a member of the Gemplus group's executive committee from 1995 to 2001. He began his career as a technical sales engineer at Compagnie Générale des Eaux (French water company) in 1982, before moving to Thomson Semiconducteurs (which became SGS-Thomson and is now known as STMicroelectronics), where he performed various manufacturing, planning and marketing-related duties. Rémy is a graduate of Lille's Ecole centrale and holds a degree in economics from Lille University.

Before coming on board in 2008, Richard Vacher Detournière served as a partner at Siparex, one of France's leading private equity investment groups. He joined Siparex in 1994, and was instrumental in more than 25 financing transactions, including leveraged buy-outs, growth capital investments and investments in young, innovative companies. Richard went on to serve as a partner in the information technology sector. Following that, he helped to run SBV Venture Partners in California's Silicon Valley, a venture capital firm co-managed by Siparex. He was Siparex's permanent representative on the boards of thirteen of its portfolio companies, including Nanolase (sold to JDS Uniphase), SoiSic (sold to ARM), Leguide.com (listed on NYSE Alternext Paris), EVE (specializing in hardware/software co-verification) and INSIDE. He also served on the audit committees of many of these companies. He started off his business career in 1990 as a consultant at Price Waterhouse, concentrating on auditing and transaction support services, first in France, then in Central Europe. Richard, a graduate of the Ecole supérieure de commerce in Amiens, holds a Master's degree in accountancy and finance.

Prior to joining INSIDE Secure, Mr. Garnier was vice president and general manager at Texas Instruments (TI), where he was in charge of the worldwide baseband business and worldwide wireless strategic programs. At TI, he also managed equity investment and acquisition activities within the wireless ecosystem. Prior to TI, he was chairman and CEO of Everbee Networks, a company developing systems-on-chips for personal Internet security devices. Before that, Mr. Garnier was general manager of the Alcatel Microelectronics broadband Access Business, which he founded and turned into a world-leading ADSL chipset maker before it was acquired by STMicroelectronics in 2002.

Pascal Didier joined the company in 2003. From 1988 to 2002, he worked for Gemplus, where he fulfilled the role of Vice President for E-Solutions from 2000 to 2002. Involved with Gemplus from its formation onwards, Pascal was part of the management team that set up the firm's North American subsidiary. He went on to occupy various sales and marketing positions within the firm, including Director of Sales Operations, as well as being a member of the executive committee and of the supervisory board (representing employee shareholders). He began his career as a designer of integrated circuits and a technical support engineer at Philips Components in France and in the United States, before moving to Thomson Semiconducteurs (which became SGS Thomson and is now STMicroelectronics) to manage smart card marketing in its memory division. Pascal is a graduate of two Parisian institutions, the Ecole polytechnique and the Ecole nationale supérieure des télécommunications.

Before joining the company, Christian Fleutelot was the Managing Director of Atmel Corporation's SMS smart card business (acquired by INSIDE on 30 September 2010), a position he had held since 2007. His achievements included guiding SMS toward market segments with a higher level of added value, as well as overseeing its exit from the SIM card market. Prior to that, Christian was credited with the formation of numerous business units within Atmel Corp. In particular, at the company's Rousset operation in France, he created smart card and 32-bit microcontroller product lines. Between 1988 and 1995, he worked for ES2, a company specializing in on-demand integrated circuit production, where he performed a variety of sales management-related duties. When ES2 was bought over by Atmel Corp. in 1995, Christian had become their Director of Marketing. The early stages of his career were spent as an engineer at Matra défense, based in Paris Region. Christian graduated from the Ecole centrale de Lyon and holds a post-graduate degree in micro-electronics.

Dr. Blake-Wilson is responsible for INSIDE Secure’s embedded security solutions division. Before joining INSIDE Secure, Mr Blake-Wilson was Vice President of the Embedded Security Solutions division at AuthenTec (then SafeNet) in 2006. He spent four years addressing security issues for the Federal Aviation Administration. From 1998 to 2002, he worked with Certicom as director of business development and cryptographic research.  

Dr. Blake-Wilson is a well-known researcher and authority in wireless security, and the co-inventor of EAP-TTLS, one of the industry's most popular WLAN security solutions. He edited several ANSI standards on Elliptic Curve Cryptography which have been adopted by the US government. He has also been heavily involved with a number of industry standards bodies including Bluetooth, ICAO, IEEE, IETF, and OMA.

Dr. Blake-Wilson is a certified information systems security professional, holds a Ph.D. in Information Security and Mathematics from the University of London, and spent a year as a Fulbright scholar visiting Auburn University.

Dr. Dimitrios Karayiannis joined INSIDE Secure in 2012, bringing more than 16 years of Hardware, Software experience in Semiconductor industry including more than 10 years of management experience in product development of Application and BaseBand Processors. He leads the R&D organisation and is responsible for the development of all products for INSIDE Secure Near Field Communication (NFC), Digital Security and Secure Payment business lines. Prior to joining INSIDE Secure, Dr. Karayiannis held various positions at Texas Instruments in the United States and France. As a member of the senior leadership team at Texas Instruments France, he managed the R&D organisation for the Wireless Business Unit. Dr. Karayiannis holds a Ph.D degree in Computer Science from Southern Illinois University.

Damien Laroche began working for the company in 2003. He started his professional career as a product engineer at SGS-Thomson (now STMicroelectronics). In 1989, he joined Gemplus as its Engineering Manager, focusing mainly on electrical and physical chip card characterization. Later, as Industrial Manager of Module Assembly, he played a significant role in the construction and launch of the firm's La Ciotat plant in France. In 1996, Gemplus appointed him to the position of Worldwide Industrial Director for Contactless Products. It was in this post that he helped develop contactless card fabrication technologies, such as combi-cards for the transport and access control markets. In addition, he developed RFID tags for laundry services and libraries, and coordinated Gemplus' contactless production sites. Today Damien runs the group's operations, overseeing quality, engineering, logistics and industrial purchasing. He holds a postgraduate degree in micro-electronics from the University of Bordeaux.

Bruno Charrat is one of the founders of the Company. Since 2010, he has been responsible for its innovation strategy; more specifically, he is tasked with defining INSIDE's future technologies and products. He has played an active role in the development of standards for the contactless industry and owns essential patents relating to NFC technology (filed from 2000 onward), as well as to other innovative areas. Bruno has defined architectures for the company's main products, including, in 1998, a new architecture for microprocessors aimed at the contactless market. Subsequently, he took charge of the NFC product line and its commercial launch. Before joining the firm, Bruno was a Systems Engineer at Gemplus, where from 1992 to 1995 he worked on the very first contactless systems for smart cards and the RFID market. He has a degree in systems engineering from Polytech Marseille.

Bernard Vian came to the company via Gemplus, where he held positions in sales and marketing. He also opened Gemplus' Californian office in 1996. As the firm's Applications Service Support Director for North America, a role he performed until 2001, he built strong customer relationships with Visa International and Visa USA. Bernard shaped Gemplus into the world's largest Visa chip card vendor, overseeing the delivery of over twenty million cards to bank issuers as part of the first ' VISA Smart Breakthrough Program ' in the United States. He then joined INSIDE in 2002 as Business Development Manager, going on to successfully position the MicroPass product on the contactless market. Bernard is a graduate of Marseille's Institut universitaire des sciences pour l’ingénieur.

Gary Chew came aboard INSIDE in 2006 as Vice President for Global Services, before taking up his current position in 2007. From 1993 to 2006, he fulfilled a variety of technical management roles with Gemplus. In particular, he was Regional Technical Director for the Asia-Pacific zone, Vice President of Software Engineering for the Americas, and Research and Development Software Director. Gary has over 20 years of experience in systems design and software development in various sectors, including banking, mobile networks and business security. He holds several smart card-related patents. He is a graduate of the Ecole nationale supérieure des télécommunications in Paris.