A historian by training, B.A., New York University, Nara built her understanding of institutional failure long before she built infrastructure to prevent it.
Her career spans financial compliance and identity verification at LPL Financial, State Street, and TD Bank, where she developed firsthand expertise in what happens when identity systems are weaponized against the very people they are meant to serve, and who pays the price when they fail.
She founded FISE in 2017 and spent three years as a solo architect before assembling a team, driven by a single conviction: every technological revolution that failed to protect individual sovereignty eventually collapsed under the weight of its own extractive architecture. After recruiting Kevin Hartig as CTO, she initiated and directed the design and sovereign processes for the core technical infrastructure that defines FISE's approach: the Master DID framework, the legal-tech smart contract engine, and the NFT-anchored data provenance system that makes human data sovereignty enforceable, not aspirational.
The East India Company, the most powerful corporation in history, did not fall to a competitor. It fell to the weight of its own model, extraction without consent, at scale, until rebellion and collapse made it unsustainable. Web2 is the live, unfolding version of that same story. Facebook, Google, and Amazon built extraction engines on top of what had been an open commons. We are living through the early stages of that architecture's instability now.
FISE exists to make sure the next technological revolution protects individual sovereignty sustainably and interoperably.
A physicist by training, B.S. Physics and Astronomy, University of Massachusetts Amherst, with graduate research at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Kevin brings a foundational systems thinker's approach to the hardest problems in distributed architecture.
His career spans 25 years at the frontier of computing. At Sun Microsystems he served as Chief Architect for Ford Motor Company's Java Center of Excellence and Lead Architect for GM OnStar's first voice-controlled, web-enabled vehicle. At Digital Reasoning Systems he led early work in intelligent data mining on unstructured text, a decade before large language models made that capability mainstream. As VP of Technology at The Atrium Capital Market Group, he scaled assets under management from under $1M to over $70M through real-time data architecture.
At FISE, Kevin architected the Master DID framework, the legal-tech smart contract engine, and the NFT-anchored data provenance system that makes human data sovereignty enforceable, not just aspirational. He is also Technical Director at the County of Santa Clara, where he leads the engineering of a system managing $10 billion in annual property tax transactions.
He is the founder of Assimilator, an open source self-healing distributed computing environment, and co-author of the FISE Technologies White Paper on self-sovereign identity.
