Bill Cromie

CTO at BeRecognized

Brooklyn, New York, United States

About Bill Cromie

Bill Cromie is CTO at BeRecognized. Location: Brooklyn, New York, United States.

Technology executive and civic operator with 20 years building high-trust platforms and the teams behind them. I’m currently CTO of BeRecognized, where I lead both the technology org and the go-to-market function. I’m responsible for engineering, security, reliability, and product delivery—alongside customer development, enterprise sales, partnerships, and strategic business development. We’ve issued 22M+ credentials on user-held identity architecture designed to verify without centralized PII databases, issuer callbacks, or deep cross-system integrations—reducing breach and surveillance risk by design. I work directly with senior leaders across Fortune 100 enterprises and national-level public-sector stakeholders on identity strategy, governance, and deployment planning for high-trust, cross-boundary systems. Previously, I co-founded and led Blue Ridge Labs @ Robin Hood, where we embedded community governance directly into discovery and delivery through the Design Insight Group (DIG). We launched or funded 28+ civic-tech ventures serving millions of New Yorkers, including Propel (5M+ served) and Upsolve (~$1B in consumer debt relieved). I also was the CEO of HelpKitchen (2.2M+ meals served to 45K households via an automated, dignity-preserving workflow), founded CoPromote (800K users; $3.6M raised), and co-founded Selectable Media (top-10 U.S. video ad network at peak; exit to Meredith). My bias is boring reliability over novelty: build capacity, ship safely, and treat privacy-preserving design as product quality. Like inclusive design, it produces better systems for everyone—reducing attack surface, simplifying governance, and improving long-term portability. Boring is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Skills

  • Data Governance
  • Distributed Systems
  • Scalability

Additional experience

  • Board Member

    the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)

    Started August 2025

Education

  • Bachelor's degree, New York University
  • Undergraduate, KU Leuven