Josh Sookman 
CEO | Guardly
Toronto, ON, CANADA
CEO at Guardly. VC experience. Mentor at JOLT Accelerator and INcubes. Toronto StartupDigest co-curator.
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Biography
Josh is currently the CEO at Guardly, an enterprise mobile safety company he founded to save lives and to help security operations teams better respond to threats against their assets. Guardly technologies improve situational awareness by providing real-time data otherwise not available to security operators – such as the indoor location position of mobile emergency callers – thereby enabling better decisions, response efforts and outcomes.
Prior to Guardly, Josh worked in Venture Capital with the BlackBerry Partners Fund (now Relay Ventures) and RBC Venture Partners. In these roles, he was the Lead Analyst for 10 completed investments including Aepona (acquired by Intel), Varicent (acquired by IBM), SocialDeck (acquired by Google), Xobni (acquired by Yahoo!) & Transpera (acquired by Tremor Media). He also worked with portfolio companies on business strategy, product development & user experience design. Josh has developed expertise in location-based services, mobile social networking and mobile advertising.
Josh is an avid supporter of innovation and startup communities, acting as co-Curator of Toronto StartupDigest and as a Mentor at the JOLT Accelerator and the INcubes startup incubator in Toronto, Canada. He has judged competitions for entrepreneurs including the Social eChallenge Competition at Stanford University, the Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) at MIT and Intel Challenge Europe. Josh also helped organize TEDxToronto 2010.
He loves wakeboarding, snowboarding, squash and playing hockey (like any real canuck).
Industry Expertise (8)
VC and Private Equity
Internet
Safety
Fund-Raising
Wireless
Telecommunications
Public Safety
Security
Areas of Expertise (10)
Raising Seed Financing (For Startups)
Employee Safety
Campus Safety
Workplace Violence
Working Alone
Lone Workers
Software as A Service
Startups
Toronto
Corporate Security
Education (2)
Western University: Honors Genetics, Biology 2006
University of Toronto: Masters, Biotechnology 2008
Affiliations (8)
- Guardly
- StartupDigest
- JOLT
- INcubes
- ASIS
- Security Executive Council
- SIA
- NENA
Links (2)
Event Appearances (5)
Raising Money
Entrepreneurship 101 - Hosted by MaRS Toronto, ON
2010-11-24
Improving Incident Outcomes with Mobile, Realtime Solutions for Large-Scale Campuses
Secured Cities Baltimore, MD
2013-11-14
Improving Incident Outcomes with Mobile, Real-Time Solutions for Large-Scale Campus Facilities
Next Generation Security Leader (NGSL) Toronto Markham, ON
2014-04-23
How Mobile is Driving Disruptive Transformation in Corporate Security
Seminar Series: Achieving Incident Management Excellence in Your Security Operations Center Toronto, ON
2014-02-26
How Mobile is Driving Disruptive Transformation in Corporate Security
Seminar Series: Achieving Incident Management Excellence in Your Security Operations Center Calgary, AB
2014-03-05
Style
Availability
- Keynote
- Moderator
- Panelist
Social