Fredericton-based criminal-intelligence startup Cybercheck has made Chris Ramsey its CEO, effective September 2023. Ramsey, a 30-plus year veteran in the technology-software and SaaS industries, has previously held senior roles with Salesforce and Radian6.
Ramsey has held senior executive roles at NASDAQ, and NYSE-traded firms, including Salesforce, where he led social media listening and analytics products to triple-digit growth as chief customer officer.
Cybercheck provides intelligence for major crime investigations including homicides, child exploitation, and cold cases.
Before Salesforce, Ramsey co-founded and served as executive VP of business development and product management at Radian6, the global leader in social media listening and analytics. Social media listening is the practice of monitoring your social media channels to learn what your audience, competition and so on think of your company and brand in real time. It may be used for such things as monitoring for threats for example.
Salesforce.com said that Radian6’s technology had the ability to capture hundreds of millions of conversations every day across Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs and online communities.
Current CEO and founder Adam Mosher will transition to CTO, enabling him to spend more time on Cybercheck’s core technology and customers, the company said.
Cybercheck provides intelligence for major crime investigations including homicides, human trafficking, child exploitation, cybercrime, real-time fugitive manhunts, and cold cases. Accelerating the speed of investigations with machine-learning AI algorithms and automation, Cybercheck claims it improves case clearance time.
In his role at Radian6, Ramsey grew the sales organization from zero revenue growth to a run rate in the tens of millions and over 4,000 customers (run rate is a forecast of a company’s future financial performance, typically calculated by multiplying the revenue in one month by 12 to get the expected revenue for a year). This success led to the acquisition in 2011 of Radian6 by Salesforce for $436.9 million CAD ($326 million USD), winning Radian6 the Canadian Venture Capital Association’s Venture Deal of the Year award.
At the time of the deal, Salesforce lauded Radian6 as the “industry-leading social media monitoring platform used by more than half of Fortune 100 companies.”
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The intelligence gained from online conversations has become critical in helping companies better market and sell to prospective customers, serve existing ones, and understand what’s being said about their brands, products, and competitors, according to Salesforce.
Ramsey continues to act as a strategic advisor with Potential Motors, an electric-vehicle technology startup. Potential Motors secured about $4 million CAD ($3.2 million USD) in convertible debt seed extension funding in 2022 to further develop its solution, grow its team, and begin showcasing its vehicle-control software, which is built for electric side-by-sides, a type of small off-road vehicle that can carry a passenger.
Cybercheck founder Adam Mosher expressed excitement about welcoming Ramsey to the team.
“To be able to attract talent like Chris Ramsey to our company to take Cybercheck through the next evolution of scale-up, investment attraction, and market expansion is a huge, huge win for everyone,” Mosher said. “I’m very pleased to be provided with the opportunity to focus on my passion and continue to advance the technology we’ve developed to help solve major criminal investigations even faster.”
That Cybercheck is able to attract Ramsey demonstrates cybersecurity hasn’t run its course yet as a valuable play. In January 2023, the private-equity firm Thoma Bravo struck a deal in January to buy Kitchener-Waterloo-based Magnet Forensics for $1.8 billion CAD. Thoma Bravo took the publicly-traded company private, and combined it with digital forensics firm Grayshift.
Feature image courtesy of Pixabay
