Sami Nassar helped put the SIM card in your phone. Now he runs SecEdge, betting that securing the edge is the last real bottleneck to a connected world.
In the early 1990s, a piece of plastic barely bigger than a fingernail slid into the world's cell phones and quietly changed how billions of people would be trusted by a network. The SIM card carried an identity a phone company could believe. Sami Nassar was one of the people who helped put it there. Three decades later he is still working on the same question, only now it wears different clothes: how do you make a machine worth trusting?
That question is the through-line of a career that most people in technology would struggle to summarize, because it refuses to sit still. Smart cards. Location services. Semiconductors. Connected cars. Edge AI. On paper it looks like restlessness. Look closer and it is the opposite - a single problem followed patiently across every place it decided to hide.
Today Nassar is the Founder, President and Co-CEO of SecEdge, a Seattle-based company built to secure the sprawling, awkward world of Internet-of-Things and edge devices. It is the kind of company you found when you have seen the problem coming for twenty years and finally decide to build the fix yourself.
Start at the beginning and the pattern is obvious. In the 1990s, as Managing Director for Telecom Smart Cards and Systems at what is now Thales Digital Identity and Security, Nassar worked on the smart-card technology that let a mobile network trust the device in your pocket. The SIM card was not glamorous. It was infrastructure - the invisible handshake that made the whole system safe enough to scale.
In the 2000s he moved to the next place trust was needed. He helped build one of the first cell-phone location-based services companies, back when the idea that your phone knew where you were felt like science fiction rather than a setting you toggle off. Then came the semiconductor years: General Manager of the Advanced Solutions Group at Renesas Electronics, a stint running fiber-optic products at Broadcom, and finally more than a decade at NXP Semiconductors.
Different devices, different decades - the same question underneath: can you trust it?
At NXP he ran the Digital Security ICs business as VP and General Manager from 2010, then shifted to Corporate Business Development. These were the years mobile payments, the connected car, and the first serious wave of IoT arrived all at once, each one a fresh reason to worry about who and what a system should believe.
Some of Nassar's most lasting work happened not in a product but in a committee. He is a founding and board member of the FIDO Alliance, the industry group behind the passwordless authentication standards now quietly replacing the passwords you hate. He has also served on the board of the National Cyber Security Alliance and as a board councilor at the EastWest Institute, a think tank focused on reducing global conflict.
This is the unglamorous half of security work. Standards do not ship with a launch event. But they decide what billions of devices are allowed to assume about each other, and getting them right early is worth more than almost any single product. Nassar has spent a lot of his career in those rooms.
“Our team of industry veterans in cybersecurity and semiconductors is set to resolve one of the key threats to IoT market growth: the complexity of deploying chip-to-cloud security.”
Sami Nassar, on founding SecEdgeHere is where the story turns. A veteran with fifteen-plus years inside NXP and Renesas has an easy next chapter available: advisory roles, board seats, the comfortable perimeter of a career well spent. Nassar took the harder one. He joined Privafy in 2019 as EVP of Products and Chief Strategy Officer, working on data-in-motion security, and became an Operating Partner at Sway Ventures. Then, in 2023, he did the thing that requires actual conviction - he built.
SecEdge was assembled, not just started. Nassar carved out Privafy's IoT business and combined it with the acquisition of Sequitur Labs, whose EmSPARK Security Suite was well regarded in embedded security circles. The merger paired Privafy's data-in-motion security with Sequitur's chip-level protection - the two ends of that chip-to-cloud chain, brought under one roof. In November 2023, Raptor Group led the company's Series A.
He runs the company alongside Chief Technology Officer Philip Attfield, Sequitur's founder, and a leadership bench drawn from engineering, IoT, and Edge AI. The pitch is unfussy: securing a fleet of connected devices from the silicon all the way to the cloud is genuinely hard, and that difficulty - not device cost - is what keeps IoT from scaling the way the forecasts keep promising.
“We're excited to be moving forward with an excellent partner in Raptor Group, and combine our portfolio with Sequitur Labs.”
Sami Nassar, November 2023The reason any of this matters more now than it did in the SIM-card era is that the number of things asking to be trusted has exploded. A modern car, a factory sensor, a smart meter, a server's baseboard management controller - each is a small computer sitting somewhere unattended, often for a decade, running code that has to be trustworthy the whole time. And increasingly they run AI at the edge, making decisions locally instead of phoning home.
In early 2024 SecEdge announced a collaboration with ASPEED and the launch of a SEC-TPM aimed at securing server BMCs, the low-level controllers that quietly manage the machines inside data centers. It is exactly the sort of unglamorous, load-bearing target Nassar has spent his career on - the part nobody notices until it fails.
What is easy to miss in a CV this long is how consistent it is. Plenty of technologists chase whatever is loud that year. Nassar's record reads more like someone who found his problem early and simply refused to let go of it. The SIM card and the edge TPM are separated by thirty years and an entire industry, but they are answers to the same question, asked by the same person.
He holds a Master of Science in Computer Science and Telecommunication. He is based in the San Francisco Bay Area while SecEdge sits in Seattle - a small detail that fits a career spent connecting things that live in different places. And for all the standards-body seriousness, the work has a quiet optimism to it: the belief that trust can be engineered, layer by layer, and that when it is done right you never think about it at all.
That is the tell of good infrastructure. You do not notice the SIM card. You will not notice the security on the sensor in your building. If Nassar has his way, that invisibility is the whole point - the machines get trustworthy, and you get to forget they were ever a risk.