Shooting victim was CEO at startup
Matthew Staikos, 37, died Monday after being shot at Bay St. and Yorkville Ave.
The family of Matthew Staikos have released a statement saying they are mourning the loss of the tech startup CEO, who was killed in a shooting Monday night. The CEO behind a Toronto-based startup called Vleepo and a former BlackBerry employee was shot and killed late Monday night. Staikos, 37, of Toronto, was found dead at the scene after Toronto Police responded to witness reports of a shooting at Bay St. and Yorkville Ave. around 11:30 p.m.
“Our family is mourning the sudden loss of our beloved Matthew,” the family said in a written statement Wednesday. “We ask that you respect the privacy of our family as we cope with this tragedy.”
On Twitter, Staikos described himself as a tech junkie, entrepreneur, investor and traveller. According to his LinkedIn account, he has been CEO of Vleepo Inc. since May 2015, with a software team based out of Greece.
Vleepo is described on its website as a “new messaging platform that is redefining what group chat should be.”
According to a bio on ellines.com, Staikos was born in 1980 and graduated from the University of Toronto. As an undergraduate, he and his brother George founded Torch Mobile in 2003, with subsidiaries in Beijing.
Six years later, Torch Mobile was acquired by BlackBerry parent company Research in Motion, where Staikos became the technical director of web technologies for Blackberry, according to his LinkedIn. He left in July 2013.
“I never thought he’d leave us so quickly, so unjustly … I read and reread the news in Canadian media and I don’t want to accept that this wonderful man and friend will no longer be among us,” Greek ambassador to Canada Dimitris Azemopoulos wrote in a Facebook post.
“Sometimes it is impossible to express the anguish of our soul. One of these times is also for me tonight writing these lines for my friend Matthew.”
The suspect is described as Black, 5foot-10 with a medium build. He fled the area in a vehicle described as a silver or grey four-door Mercedes.
Staikos’s death is the latest in a rash of shootings across the city over a 30-hour period. At around the same time Monday night, another shooting occurred near Yorkdale Shopping Centre; a man in his 20s was taken to hospital with serious, but non-life-threatening injuries, paramedics say.
Just a day earlier, four separate shootings rocked the city.
According to police stats, there have been 162 shootings and 215 victims this year as of Sunday, an 11 per cent increase from the same time last year.