Heather C Dahl biography

Heather is a founder and CEO of Indicio, the market leader in developing open source Trusted Digital Ecosystems to verify and exchange high-value information. During her tenure, she has driven the company’s growth strategy, playing an instrumental role in expanding Indicio’s customer base and product roadmap, which includes launching Proven™, a complete, verifiable credential solution that makes it easy for companies and organizations to implement and scale open-source decentralized identity.

Under Heather’s leadership,  Indicio has rapidly grown into the leading developer of decentralized identity solutions for global clients. Working with SITA, the leading provider of IT to the air transport sector, and the government of Aruba, Indicio developed an award-winning solution for travelers to share health data in a tamper proof, fraud-resistant privacy-preserving way. The resulting code was donated to Linux Foundation Public Health as Cardea,  an open-source solution for sharing health data. Indicio is now working with SITA to use the same technology to enable seamless travel through a Digital Travel Credential.

The decentralized identity technology built by Indicio solves the challenge of verifying data without having to check in with the source of that data or rely on a third party to store and check the data. This leads to a Trusted Digital Ecosystem: All parties can verify each other and the data they share and can do so in a way that allows consent and delivers privacy and a new level of security.

This ability to trust data solves chronic problems in online interaction. It enables compliance with data privacy law because data doesn’t need to be held by third parties; it removes identity access and integration complexity and cost, it removes inefficiencies and errors in critical information flows, and it makes implementing Zero Trust approaches easy because there is minimal friction to continuous verification. Indicio has built and is building Trusted Digital Ecosystems for a growing list of global clients in finance, healthcare, IoT, logistics, and the public sector.

In leading Indicio to this success, Heather saw that  decentralized identity could be a symbiotic technology,successfully layered onto existing systems, simplifying integration, and providing a cost-effective path to adaptation, and innovation. Through a commitment to open source, open standards and interoperability, Heather also saw that identity and data could be digitally portable and that the internet could be opened up through seamless verification and trust.

That this vision is becoming a reality is due to Heather’s leadership. She has built a company of the brightest minds in decentralized identity, each committed to  delivering superlative engineering and customer service. Indicio’s team culture is internally collaborative so that the company can provide 360 degrees of contextualized client support — from business development to governance to marketing in addition to engineering. This holistic approach is the key to unlocking our clients’ successes. 

Prior to Indicio, Heather led the Sovrin Foundation through its most significant period of growth, and she led research teams at KPMG and at telecommunications firm Neustar. Heather has an MBA from Johns Hopkins University and an M.S. from Columbia; she earned her B.A. from Willamette. She served as chair of the National Press Foundation board of directors and as chair of the Congressional Correspondents Association. She is a member of the Governing Board of the Hyperledger Foundation. Heather is widely regarded as a global thought leader on online privacy and security issues, and she advises governments and global NGOs on decentralized identity applications. Heather is a committed advocate for privacy-preserving cybersecurity technologies.

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