Jad Saliba never planned to leave the street. He was a police officer in the Waterloo region, a patrol cop, until cancer took that job away from him. After a year of radiation and chemotherapy he was well enough to come back, but not to patrol. The service moved him into digital forensics, the unit that digs evidence out of seized phones and computers.
It looked like a consolation posting. It turned out to be the whole story.
What almost nobody outside forensics knew was that this was not a startup idea.
Saliba started spending evenings and weekends writing a program of his own. He has described it as a fix for a problem he was having at work, a way to pull internet chat, browser and social media traces out of a drive without hours of manual digging. He called it Internet Evidence Finder. Colleagues borrowed it. Then officers in other agencies asked for copies.
What almost nobody outside forensics knew was that this was not a startup idea. It was a tool built by a man who had been told his old career was closed, and who was working inside the unit that handled some of the worst cases an officer sees. The pull of the work, not a business plan, kept him writing code.
Saliba was a gifted builder, not a seller. The company that grew around IEF needed someone who knew how to run one. He found Adam Belsher, a senior executive at BlackBerry, and the two partnered: Belsher as chief executive, Saliba as the technical founder. Magnet Forensics was formally founded in 2009, in Waterloo, the same town that had produced BlackBerry.
The cost of that choice was a different kind of pressure. Their customers were police services and governments, buyers who move slowly and compare every tool against Cellebrite and others. Magnet kept pushing into mobile devices and cloud data, and moved to the Toronto Stock Exchange in April 2021 at C$17 a share.
Then came a harder lesson. Magnet had planned to buy Grayshift, the Atlanta firm it had worked with for years. Thoma Bravo got there first, buying a stake in July 2022 and outbidding Magnet that autumn. Rather than fight, Magnet agreed to be bought. In January 2023, Thoma Bravo agreed to pay C$44.25 a share, about C$1.8 billion, and to merge the two companies, with Belsher and Saliba staying in senior roles.
By the time of the sale, nearly 3,000 agencies in 90 countries were reported to use the product, a company-era figure, but it shows how far a spare-time tool from a sidelined cop had travelled.
The lesson is easy to miss. Saliba did not set out to build a business. He built something because he had a job to do and a limited body to do it with. The company came later, once somebody else needed the same help.