Token Appoints Katy Nelson as Chief Revenue Officer
ROCHESTER, N.Y.--( BUSINESS WIRE)--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.
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.