After about two years of remote operations, Swedish-based cybersecurity company Truesec has opened the headquarters of its American subsidiary on the Southbank near downtown.
The move has been a long time coming, with Covid-19 forcing the company to delay its plans for the Jacksonville office.
In 2021, Truesec Global appointed Tomas Sjöström as CEO of its Truesec Inc. subsidiary, giving him the task of growing its operations in the United States.
Sjöström came to the company after more than 15 years as a senior manager at technology companies, including as global sales director at RapidiOnline, senior director of development at Verifone and head of development and innovation at PostNord Group.
His first task: looking for a city for the company's U.S. headquarters. After considering areas like Silicon Valley and Austin, he said he kept coming back to the place where he lived and knew well: Jacksonville.
Making that plan a reality was delayed by the pandemic, as the company focused on serving its clients through a mostly remote workforce.
Those workers help companies prevent data breaches and recover from them, including finding and fixing weaknesses in IT systems, detecting intrusions and responding to attacks. Its clients include banks, defense contractors, insurance companies and technology, media and health care firms.
Sjöström said the company's remote workforce was well equipped to handle the challenges presented by Covid, but he needed to open a headquarters both for security reasons — many of the company's clients require security measures like video monitoring, key cards and safes — and because he wanted to develop a cyber security community within Jacksonville.
Sjöström was finally able to realize that goal Thursday, with the company hosting its first community event for industry professionals to network and share resources and education — an event that doubled as the company's grand opening Thursday evening.
The office, located at 1300 Riverplace Boulevard, will serve as a base of operations for the company's six local employees. The bulk of the company's operations — more than 270 employees — remain in Europe but are an asset Sjöström said he can access to help clients.
"The location for this office was very important to me," Sjöström told the Business Journal. "The Southbank has a very European feel. The view is amazing and I like the ability to walk to lunch or go places without the need for a car with my employees or clients. I'm used to working in Stockholm, we would walk everywhere. So that accessibility weighed heavily on my decision to be on the Southbank."
The local contingent might be growing, though, with Sjöström saying he wants to triple the size of his Jacksonville workforce this year, with plans for further growth in 2024.
The company has already been growing on the customer-facing front: In the past year, Sjöström said he has doubled the size of the North American business to about 80 clients, including several large nationwide tech companies.
He said his firm focuses on businesses that have about 500 to 2,000 employees but has worked with companies as large as 10,000+ employees.
