Robert Grant is a reluctant cryptographer.

“The last thing I would’ve wanted to do is start another company,” Grant, the CEO and founder of Crown Sterling, told Ars. “It’s like my wife asking me if we can have another child… I have two. And I am not looking forward to another child.”

But he and a collaborator believed that they had made a profound discovery, one that would fundamentally shake the core of modern encryption. “We thought, well, just out of a sense of responsibility, we should start a non-factor-based encryption technology,” Grant said. “And that’s what we did with Time AI.”