The Canadian market comprises less than 10% of Magnet Forensics’ customer base. There, they work on R&D, product management, customer support, sales, marketing, and operations. Today, Magnet Forensics’ Waterloo location is home to approximately 75% of the company’s 200-plus employees, including the majority of its executive team. Since then, the company has moved twice to accommodate its growth. “The Accelerator Centre focuses on business fundamentals and hitting your milestones within a set period of time, which has helped a lot of companies like Magnet Forensics to scale quickly,” says Belsher. In its early days, Magnet Forensics’ home base was at Waterloo’s Accelerator Centre, an organization specializing in mentoring and financing assistance for local startups. He partnered up with Belsher (then a BlackBerry senior executive), with whom he shared a goal of working for the public good. “Back then, there were no quality tools to assist investigators in the recovery of the new forms of evidence that were becoming integral to investigations like social media, and Jad believed he could make a positive impact on community safety-which led him to begin working on creating software for his colleagues in policing,” says Adam Belsher, CEO of Magnet Forensics.Įventually, Saliba decided to strike out on his own and sell the software for a licensing fee. It was there that he began working on the technology. Early daysĪ true local success story, Magnet Forensics was founded by Jad Saliba, a Waterloo Regional Police constable who-after surviving Stage 4 cancer-later re-joined the police force in its high-tech crimes unit (often referred to as digital-forensics in other agencies). One of its most high-profile cases where its software played an integral role was in the Boston Marathon bomber investigation. To date, Magnet Forensics’ software has been used by authorities in all sorts of cases-from child sexual exploitation to assault, domestic disputes, online threats and bullying, other violent crimes, and even counter-terrorism.
That digital evidence is then used to build stronger cases against perpetrators and exonerate the innocent. One example would be online chat “artifacts”-that is, older digital conversations existing in a physical computer’s or smartphone’s memory, even if users think those conversations have disappeared from their phones or laptops. Headquartered in Waterloo, the company specializes in “digital investigative technology.” Essentially, its software locates important data for investigations. With a goal to transform policing and public safety for the 21st century, Magnet Forensics develops and sells digital-forensics software to over 4,000 government agencies and other organizations with investigative authorities in 93 countries worldwide. Magnet Forensics wants to make it harder to get away with crime.