NEXT Biometrics Scales Up with Management Changes

NEXT Biometrics is scaling up with some new organizational changes.

The company’s EVP of Engineering, Dan Cronin, has now been appointed its Chief Operating Officer. This is a newly created position, and is tasked with integrating the development and manufacturing of NEXT’s fingerprint sensor technology into a single, streamlined unit.

Meanwhile, a new hire, Ravi Jagannath, has come to the company from a previous role with chip maker Cirrus Logic, where he served in a senior operations role. With NEXT, Jagannath will be the SVP of Operations, reporting to Cronin.

Additionally, the company’s Chief of Staff and HR Officer, Zehira Sitbon-Dadon, will take on an expanded role concerned with “Sales & Operation Planning”, according to an internal memo circulated in the company. Authored by CEO Ritu Favre, the memo emphasizes the need for NEXT “to transition to efficient manufacturing, rapidly move up the learning curve, improve yields, and negotiate world-class pricing with all our manufacturing partners.” Favre explained that the organizational changes “will enable us to rapidly scale to launch a broad range of products into multiple markets while delivering the highest levels of quality at low cost.”

The structural changes come about a month after a quarterly update in which NEXT Biometrics reached the milestone of attaining a positive gross margin thanks to a strategy focused on promoting its fingerprint sensors in the government ID, notebook, access control, and biometric smart card markets. The latter in particular appears to be an area of fundamental importance for NEXT, with plans to begin sampling of a smart card module in the second quarter.

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April 5, 2018 – by Alex Perala