Management Team
Yukihiro Kayama – President
Yukihiro Kayama brings to GuardTime over forty years of experience in marketing disruptive technologies to mainstream clients in Japan and the US. Yukihiro’s initial career was at Mitsubishi Corporation where he had overall responsibility for running Mitsubishi’s global technology business. During his tenure there he was a driving force behind the founding of both the US and Japanese entities of Verisign with the goal of commercializing RSA’s encryption technology; JapanNet, the first Japanese Certificate Authority, NetOne Systems, which set a Japanese IPO record in 1996 and Photonic Integration Research. Other later stage investments include enCommerce, Cyber Technologies and Gupta Technologies. After retiring from Mitsubishi Corporation he founded EC-One, the first purely Java systems integrator in Japan. EC-One listed on the JASDAQ in 2002.
Yukihiro received Master’s degree in Engineering from Nihon University.
Mike Gault – Chief Executive Officer
Mike Gault is GuardTime’s CEO, being responsible for GuardTime’s strategic planning and investor relations. He brings to GuardTime over 20 years diverse experience including stints in the military, academia, engineering and financial derivatives. He spent 10 years as a mathematical modeler, five of which was spent writing code to simulate the behavior of next generation quantum effect semiconductor devices and the other five writing code to price financial derivatives. Prior to joining GuardTime he was a Managing Director at Barclays Capital.
Mike received a Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering from the University of Wales and covers interesting industry related topics in his blog.
Dr Märt Saarepera – Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer
Dr Märt Saarepera co-founded GuardTime and has served as Chief Technology Officer since April 2009. He has over 15 years of experience of research in cryptography, formal verification and hardware design. From 2002 until 2006 he worked as a CEO for Linuxprobe Co, a research and IP development oriented start-up company focusing on digital signature and time-stamping technologies. From 2000 until 2002 he was with Neoteny, a Tokyo based business incubator.
Märt received a Ph.D. in computer science from Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Dr Ahto Buldas – Co-founder and Chief Scientist
Dr Ahto Buldas is a cryptology specialist and the co-inventor of the GuardTime solution, acting as chief scientist for GuardTime. He is a chair of cryptography at the University of Tartu and has published over 30 papers in the field of digital timestamping. In 1996 Ahto was part of the original team that developed the legal basis for the Digital Signature Law in Estonia using ID-cards with RSA digital signatures which was eventually accepted by the parliament of Estonia in 2000. He was also one of the main architects of the time-stamping and notarization solutions for supporting the top-level server (held by the Ministry of Transport and Communication) of the Estonian digital signature infrastructure.
Ahto received a Ph.D. in exact sciences from Tallinn University of Technology.
Takashi Yanagihara – Representative Director, GuardTime Japan
Takashi Yanagihara brings more than 25 years experience in technology business development in Japan and China. Previously he was the founder and Vice Chairman of EC-One China, a software development company mainly for software outsourcing from Japanese companies. During the latter period of Mitsubishi Corporation of 20 years, he served as the General Manager of IT department in Shanghai, China and initiated the investment business into mobile contents provider Linktone.
Takashi received a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Waseda University.
Bart Matusow – Chief Financial Officer
Bart Matusow is Guardtime’s CFO. He has 20 years experience in the financial industry covering money markets, commercial paper, foreign exchange, corporate bonds and derivatives. Previously he was a director at Credit Suisse.
Bart received a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and English from Rutgers University.
