Josh Sookman

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).