Ashlyn is COO at Edmonton-headquartered samdesk, a real-time crisis alerting platform powered by big data and AI, where she has been a co-pilot in building the company from the ground up. Ashlyn has led samdesk through multiple fundraising rounds, most recently a $13.5M Series A. She was an inaugural Board Member at Innovate Edmonton, currently sits on the Board of Rapid Fire Theatre Society, and previously established and scaled the Venture Mentoring Service at the University of Alberta. Ashlyn holds an MBA and Ph.D. from the University of Alberta.