iProov CEO Andrew Bud is made Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering

iProov is proud to announce today that Andrew Bud, our founder and CEO, has been made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

His election comes in recognition of his outstanding and continuing contribution to the engineering profession.

“I always wanted to be an engineer. It was such a miraculous idea that by the power of thought and action you could conjure into being objects that worked and did clever and useful things.

“And then it was my parents’ dream – they could conceive of no higher calling. That was also my rare good fortune: to be supported by values that valued engineering.

“It wasn’t that common. As a student, I would go to parties and admit I was an engineer. If I was lucky, girls would ask me what kind of lawyer that was. Fortunately, the mood changed suddenly in the early 1980s, and for a period it became glamorous – a little like “building a start-up” nowadays.”

After completing his Masters degree in Engineering at the University of Cambridge, Andrew started his career at the UK Atomic Energy Authority Culham Laboratory for Fusion Research. He then moved to PA Technology where, in his words, he “designed a new catflap, spent time on an oil rig and wrote the software for the fastest chocolate Flake machine in the world.”

It was there that he got involved in the project to build the world’s first digital mobile phone and fell in love with telecommunications. During his time at Olivetti in Italy he led the project to design the Omnitel network, followed by a series of other pioneering and ground-breaking mobile technology projects.

Having spotted the opportunity of SMS, he set up mBlox, which became the world’s largest provider of SMS transmission for enterprise applications. He also helped found a new trade association, which became the Mobile Ecosystem Forum and continues to support vendors from every part of the mobile value chain

At mBlox he recognized the need for remote identity verification and the threat of replay attacks. This led to iProov.

Andrew sums it up:

“I believe that the career of an engineer is defined by the nature of the challenges they choose to face, rather than by a specific sector of technology.

“In the 1980s I took part in the microprocessor revolution, during which products of every kind were completely reengineered to respond to the disruption of microelectronics.

“In the 1990s I was privileged to be a pioneer in the dawn and flowering of the mobile communications revolution, which then evolved in the 2000s into the mobile applications revolution.

“The new challenge – the search for trust in digital identity – is perhaps even bigger and more vital than its predecessor.”

“I hope that many bright young engineers forge their careers in the excitement and challenge of the journey, and just as many can treasure their time in start-ups, scale-ups and, ultimately, the great corporations they build, and say ‘We conjured into being things that worked and did clever and useful things, for the benefit of our fellows and of all mankind’. As my parents believed, there is no higher calling.”

Andrew was also made a CBE in the 2020 New Year Honours.