In this series of looking at the people around $SIVE The next $SIVE person I wanted to understand is Todd Thomson. And I don’t think he should be seen as just another board member. This is someone who has been CFO of Citigroup. CEO of Citigroup’s $10B Global Wealth Management division. Led acquisition and strategy work at Citigroup and GE Capital. Advised Fortune 500 companies at Bain, Booz Allen, and Barents Group. Chaired investment committees. Co-founded Dynasty Financial Partners, an investment and technology platform serving nearly 50 RIA firms with around $50B under management. Now COO/CFO at Kairos Ventures, where the job is basically the tension between scientific promise and financial reality. That background matters. Because Todd is not a photonics scientist. He is a capital allocator. A financial controls person. A governance person. A person who should understand dilution, balance sheets, reporting quality, investor trust, and whether a company is financing a real scale-up or just financing a story. That is why his role at Sivers is interesting. He has been on the Sivers board since 2021. He has also been Chair of the Audit Committee. That committee is not cosmetic. It deals with internal control, financing matters, cash flow, financial reporting, financial systems, audit outcomes, and audit evaluation. In other words, exactly the things investors are debating now. Dilution. Convertibles. Cash burn. Reporting trust. U.S. listing readiness. Whether the company can become credible to larger institutions. Then comes the ownership part. Sivers 2025 annual report lists Todd Thomson with 13,060,758 shares and 0 options, including holdings by related parties. Using the post Bootstrap share count of 355,081,317 shares, that reported holding would still represent roughly 3.7% of the company, assuming it is unchanged. So the recent dilution does not only hit retail holders. It hits him too. And the recent dilution was not small. If the company is issuing shares just to survive, that is one thing. If the company is issuing shares to expand InP laser and optical amplifier capacity, strengthen the balance sheet, support the U.S. listing process, and convert pipeline into revenue, that is a very different thing. Todd should understand that difference better than most people around the table. There is a caveat. Kairos affiliated entities have sold Sivers shares before. So this is not a clean “insiders only buy” story. But Sivers clarified that the Kairos reduction was related to fund-level rebalancing and payment of fund expenses, and Todd stated that his personal Sivers holding remained intact. That distinction matters. Fund liquidity is not the same thing as personal conviction. My takeaway: Todd Thomson does not prove the Sivers thesis. But his continued alignment is a signal worth studying. Because if someone with his background in CFO work, M&A, audit oversight, investor networks, venture finance, and institutional capital still remains meaningfully exposed after the dilution, then the signal is not hype. It is that someone who understands financial risk is still willing to sit with the risk.
