
A pure mathematician left a classified career to make encrypted data useful. A decade later, her real product may be the permission to ask better questions without revealing the questioner.
Jon Jacobson is the co-founder, Group CEO and CTO of Omnisient, a privacy-preserving data collaboration platform that lets banks, insurers, retailers and healthcare organizations share and analyze consumer data without exposing raw personal information. A software engineer with more than 25 years building data platforms, he founded Omnisient in South Africa in 2019 to attack a specific problem: nearly two billion people are shut out of affordable financial services because they lack the behavioral data lenders use to assess risk. His platform uses cryptography to tokenize and match datasets locally, turning loyalty-card and retail data into alternative credit signals.