ROCHESTER, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar 24, 2026--
Token, the biometric identity assurance company, today announced the appointment of Katy Nelson as Chief Revenue Officer. Nelson will lead Token’s complete revenue organization — including Sales, Marketing, Revenue Operations, Partnerships, and Customer Success — as the company accelerates commercial growth following the launch of TokenCore.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260324980569/en/
Nelson joins Token from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she spent five years as a Partner building and leading the firm’s largest cross-sector Go-to-Market organization. During that period, she helped scale the firm from $13 billion to over $60 billion in assets under management, establishing GTM as a core operating function supporting hundreds of companies from pre-product through pre-IPO. She worked directly with a16z’s cybersecurity portfolio and built a global CISO network and community — giving her direct insight into how identity and security leaders evaluate and adopt enterprise technology.
Earlier in her career, Nelson held roles at Gartner, advising Fortune 500 and Global 2000 C-suites through major technology transitions — from cloud to mobile to the early days of AI. She is an Executive in Residence and adjunct professor at NYU Stern School of Business.
“Katy’s background at the intersection of enterprise security investing and go-to-market execution is exactly what this moment calls for. She has spent years understanding how CISOs think, what they need, and what actually gets adopted at institutional scale. Token’s market position right now is unrivaled — and Katy knows how to turn that position into velocity.” — Kevin Surace, CEO, Token
“I spent five years at a16z embedded in the investment process and supporting companies at the frontier of security and infrastructure. TokenCore is genuinely different — it doesn’t ask security leaders to trust a better credential. It makes the credential question irrelevant. My job is to make sure the right people understand it.” — Katy Nelson, CRO, Token
About TokenCore
TokenCore steps to the front of the Identity Assurance category with its biometric cryptographic proximity-based solution. Unlike MFA, which layers factors onto weak credential foundations, TokenCore binds access to a verified, physically present human through on-device biometric authentication enforced on secure hardware. Fingerprints never leave the device. Cryptographic keys are generated on-device and never exported. There is nothing for an attacker to steal, phish, or replay.
The TokenCore product line — including the TokenCore Wearable, TokenCore Portable, and TokenCore Node — integrates with existing IAM, SSO, and PAM infrastructure. It does not replace the identity stack. It completes it.
Token is backed by Grand Oaks Capital, the private equity and venture capital firm founded by Paychex founder and billionaire philanthropist B. Thomas Golisano, whose $1 billion portfolio backs companies with large addressable markets and disruptive technology.
About Token
Token is next-generation identity assurance for organizations that cannot afford to get identity wrong. Founded in 2014 and backed by Grand Oaks Capital — the firm founded by Paychex founder and billionaire philanthropist B. Thomas Golisano — Token combines wireless biometrics, cryptographic authentication, and physical proximity to make human identity non-transferable and provable. TokenCore integrates with and strengthens the IAM, SSO, and PAM tools organizations already rely on. Learn more at TokenCore.com.
Katy Nelson, Chief Revenue Officer, Token
GENEVA (AP) — Scientists in Geneva took some antiprotons out for a spin — a very delicate one — in a truck, in a never-tried-before test drive.
If this so-called antimatter comes into contact with actual matter, even for a fraction of an instant, it will be annihilated in a quick flash of energy. So experts at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, over the course of four hours Tuesday, brought about 100 antiprotons on the road.
The antiprotons are suspended in a vacuum inside a specially designed box and held in place by supercooled magnets.
After easing them from the lab and onto the truck, the scientists transported the antimatter on a half-hour drive to test how — if at all — the infinitesimal particles could be transported by road without seeping out. Now the antiprotons are on their way back to the lab in the final stage of Tuesday's experiment.
The hard part: Manipulating antimatter, like antiprotons, can be tricky business. As scientists understand the universe today, for every type particle that exists, there is a corresponding antiparticle, exactly matching the particle but with an opposite charge.
If those opposites come into contact, they “annihilate” each other, setting off lots of energy, depending on the masses involved. Any bumps in the road on the test journey that aren't compensated for by the specially-designed box could spoil the whole exercise.
Tuesday’s practice is a first step toward making good on hopes, one day, to deliver CERN antiprotons to researchers at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, which is about eight hours away in normal driving conditions.
The antiprotons have been encased in a 1,000-kilogram (2,200 pounds) box called a “transportable antiproton trap.” It's compact enough to fit through ordinary laboratory doors and fit on a truck. It uses superconducting magnets cooled to -269 degrees Celsius (-452 Fahrenheit) that allows the antiprotons to be remain suspended in a vacuum — not touching the inner walls, which are made of ... matter.
The mass in Tuesday's test — slightly less than that of about 100 hydrogen atoms — is so little, experts say, that the worst possible outcome is the loss of the antiprotons. Even if they do touch matter, any release of energy would be unnoticeable, only an oscilloscope, which picks up electrical signals, would be able to detect it.
The trap, says CERN spokeswoman Sophie Tesauri, “is supposed to contain these antiprotons no matter what: if the truck stops, if it starts again, if it has to slam on the brakes — all that.” Work remains: The trap can contain the antiprotons on its own for only about four hours, and the drive to Düsseldorf is twice that.
The Geneva-based center is best known for its Large Hadron Collider, a network of magnets that accelerates particles through a 27-kilometer (17-mile) underground tunnel and slams them together at velocities approaching the speed of light. Scientists then study the results of those collisions.
But the sprawling, buzzing complex of scientific experiment is more than just about smashing atoms together: the World Wide Web, for example, was invented here by Britain’s Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.
Heinrich Heine University is seen as a better place to study antiprotons in-depth, because CERN — with all its other activities — generates a lot of magnetic interference that can skew the study of antimatter.
But to get them there, those antiprotons will have to avoid touching anything on the way.
The center's Antiproton Decelerator, where a proton beam gets fired into a block of metal, causes collisions that generate secondary particles, including lots of antiprotons. It’s billed as a unique machine that produces low-energy antiprotons for the study of antimatter.
CERN’s “Antimatter Factory,” lab officials say, is the only place in the world where scientists can store and study antiprotons.
The center has been experimenting with antimatter for years, and has made breakthroughs on measurement, storage and interaction of antimatter. Two years ago, the team transported a “cloud” of about 70 protons — not antiprotons — across CERN's campus.
It's a similar drill this time, except that with antiprotons, a much better vacuum chamber is needed, according to Christian Smorra, head of a team behind the apparatus designed to store and transport antimatter.
This image, taken from video, shows a truck transporting antiprotons in a first-ever test drive to study antimatter at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland, March 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Jamey Keaten)
FILE - The magnet core of the world's largest superconducting solenoid magnet (CMS, Compact Muon Solenoid) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)'s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator, in Geneva, Switzerland, March 22, 2007. (AP Photo/Keystone, Martial Trezzini, File)
FILE - The globe of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, is illuminated outside Geneva, Switzerland, March 30, 2010. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus, File)
FILE - A technician works in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) tunnel of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, during a press visit in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland, Feb. 16, 2016. (Laurent Gillieron/Keystone via AP, File)
FILE - A technician works in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) tunnel of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, during a press visit in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland, Feb. 16, 2016. (Laurent Gillieron/Keystone via AP, File)
