The team building Personal Biometric Privacy.
CloakDots is built by a diverse, female-led team of business leaders, engineers and scientists, with experience spanning consumer technology, hardware engineering, product innovation, computer vision and global retail.
Why this team
Our collective experience includes companies such as Zalando, Rocket Internet, bol.com, OTTO and Tommy Hilfiger, alongside expertise in technology, AI, materials and consumer product development.
We bring together commercial leadership, technical expertise and a deep understanding of people. We have built and scaled businesses, developed physical products and worked with millions of consumers, understanding first-hand what it takes to create products that people trust, adopt and integrate into their everyday lives.
Our approach is grounded in human-centred design: understanding how people live, behave and interact with technology before engineering solutions around their real needs. We believe privacy technology must work not only technically, but also intuitively, practically and in the context of real human behaviour.
The founding team
Donna Darthuizen
Over 15 years of experience at the forefront of European retail and consumer technology, from Zalando Benelux, with a P&L of roughly €1 billion GMV, to OTTO, at roughly €2 billion GMV.
An international executive who has transformed, built and scaled businesses through some of the biggest shifts in digital commerce, and now turns that experience toward the next one: personal biometric privacy.
Connect with Donna on LinkedIn
Saad Imtiaz
An engineer with more than eight years across IoT, embedded systems, robotics and edge AI, and a published researcher in wearable robotics. He has worked with over 200 startups worldwide, taking products from concept all the way to launch, and is taking CloakDots from concept to first product.
Saad is passionate about deep tech that actually ships, and about building teams where engineering and business decisions are made in the same room. Asked how he defines success: “Success is hardware that survives contact with the real world.”
Connect with Saad on LinkedIn
Hamail Ayaz, PhD
A researcher in computer vision, deep learning and explainable AI, with a PhD focused on understanding how machines interpret complex visual data.
Hamail brings expertise in hyperspectral imaging, AI visual semantics, signal processing, multimodal AI and explainable AI to CloakDots, helping us understand not just what AI sees, but where its perception breaks.
Connect with Hamail on LinkedInAdvisors
Commercial, Financial & Strategic Advisor
A senior commercial operator with 15+ years turning early-stage ideas into scaled, international businesses. Her track record spans go-to-market strategy for new consumer products, owning the financial model and business case under real commercial pressure, and driving execution across complex organisations that don't yet have a playbook.
She has launched consumer marketplaces from zero, held full P&L responsibility at leading European e-commerce platforms, and designed corporate strategy at scale, today operating at the intersection of product strategy and large-scale execution inside a global consumer technology business.
Together, this is a team that has already done the two hardest things separately — building hardware that ships, and building consumer products that scale — and is now doing both at once, for a category nobody else has claimed.
Read the manifesto