Andre Garber and the work after the handshake

A successful week at a technology conference, Andre Garber suggested in 2019, might involve never setting foot on the conference floor. Toronto was preparing for Collision. There would be presentations, introductions and the usual competition for everybody’s calendar. Garber’s clients could generate enough work to keep him back at the office. For a lawyer working with startups, a busy desk was a perfectly respectable souvenir.

Garber has spent much of his working life around the arrangements that make other people’s ambitions possible: company structures, financing, agreements and acquisitions. Those things rarely receive applause. They do, however, tend to be noticed when they go wrong.

By October 2026, the Toronto lawyer was responsible for a larger collection of arrangements. NowVertical Group, the data and AI services company he co-founded, had appointed him permanent chief executive. He had helped bring its businesses together. Now he had to keep the resulting organization working. The handshake, it turns out, comes rather early in the story.

A company needs a beginning

Garber’s education includes a Bachelor of Arts from Ryerson University, now Toronto Metropolitan University, and a Juris Doctor from the University of Windsor. His professional route brought him into corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions. Along the way, he made a particular business of working with people whose companies were still taking shape.

At Dentons, he founded the Canadian startup program. Its early proposition was practical: young companies needed experienced legal advice before they necessarily had much money to spend on it. The program offered cost-deferred, fixed-fee arrangements. A founder could get help with the business while the business was still acquiring the means to pay for that help.

There was a commercial logic for the law firm as well. Garber described working with entrepreneurs from incorporation onward as a way to develop loyalty and advise proactively. Dentons also drew on relationships with accelerators and incubators when assessing potential clients. These included MaRS and Ryerson’s Digital Media Zone. Selecting a startup involved more than admiring its presentation.

His work included explaining the basics before the complicated questions arrived. In 2013, he joined David Little and Tom Reaume for a JOLT cohort workshop covering incorporation, commercial agreements, financing and employees. The agenda reads like a list of matters a founder can postpone only until somebody needs a signature.

“We are thrilled to provide tools to the market to make the fundraising process faster and easier.”

Andre Garber, on Dentons’ seed financing document generator, 2017

That ambition took a concrete form in 2017. Dentons introduced a free online generator for seed financing documents. One questionnaire could produce term sheets, subscription agreements, shareholder agreements and share terms. Garber, then the Canadian startup program’s director, welcomed a tool intended to reduce the work involved in getting a financing organized. Even an exciting venture needs somebody to fill in the correct boxes.

Learning how the other side works

Legal technology also put Garber in conversations about how established firms could work with startups as customers, collaborators and investors. At a 2018 legal technology forum, he appeared alongside Beagle founder Cian O’Sullivan in a discussion of law firm partnerships. Beagle used artificial intelligence in contract review. Dentons’ venture arm had invested in it.

The relationship offered a specific example of the distance between a useful product and a product that an organization can actually use. Beagle drew on the firm’s expertise and connections, and the collaboration helped with machine-learning training and the technical requirements of a large legal practice. Access to an institution meant access to the awkward details of how it functioned.

In October 2018, Garber moved to Fasken as director of its Startup and Emerging Company Services group. He and partner Will Shaw would co-lead the Ontario practice, with Garber also taking a national role. He arrived after five years spent building the startup program at his previous firm.

The brief ranged from initial financing through commercializing technology in Canada and abroad. By November 2020, Garber was appearing as a partner and co-chair in a university spinout webinar organized with UTEST and Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners. Corporate structures, shareholder agreements and intellectual property were on the agenda. Researchers with a business idea needed a workable company around it.

This makes the Collision anecdote rather less surprising. A conference was another place to understand clients’ technologies and help with the business they generated. A lawyer could have a productive time there while remaining some distance from the stage. His route through the startup community was built around that kind of usefulness.

From arranging the deal to running the business

NowVertical brought a change in responsibility. Garber became a co-founder of a company assembling data and analytics businesses, and led its mergers and acquisitions and acquisition financing programs from the beginning. Earlier company materials listed him in corporate development and legal leadership. Before becoming interim CEO, he was chief development officer.

For a corporate lawyer, an acquisition is familiar territory. For a co-founder, it also becomes part of the organization that must deliver the work afterward. The people, client relationships and operating practices continue to exist when the documents are filed. A collection of purchases leaves a collection of obligations.

Garber’s public explanation of NowVertical has emphasized the practical foundations beneath enterprise AI. At the Lytham Partners investor summit in August 2026, he discussed companies with information spread across systems that were never designed to cooperate. The task involved connecting and governing that information, then making it useful in an actual business process.

That description has an echo of his legal work: an ambitious plan depends on arrangements that can support it. At Dentons, the obstacle might have been the cost and complexity of a startup’s first financing. At NowVertical, it might be disconnected data. Each job involves practical work that has to support a larger ambition.

June’s assignment, October’s decision

On June 11, 2026, NowVertical appointed Garber interim CEO following the end of Sandeep Mendiratta’s tenure. Chair Elaine Kunda and the board began a search for a permanent leader. The assignment called for managing a business across geographies while pursuing profitable growth and bringing acquisitions together.

He stepped in with colleagues including Latin America executive Santiago Trógolo, solutions and services executive Shailesh Mallya, and delivery and operations executive Pankaj Ghag. The company was putting a co-founder in charge during a leadership transition, with its senior team supporting him.

On the August results call, Garber described taking full responsibility for the business during that interval. He also emphasized the continued involvement of leaders whose companies had become part of NowVertical. Integration had a human component: the people who knew the constituent businesses were still involved in operating the group.

The quarter ended June 30 produced US$9.7 million in revenue, up 18% from US$8.2 million a year earlier. Gross margin was 50%, compared with 47%. The comparison benefited from currency and hyperinflation effects that had depressed the previous year’s Argentine revenue, as well as lower reseller revenue in Brazil in that earlier period. Garber had become interim CEO near the quarter’s end; these were company results, rather than a personal before-and-after experiment.

On October 6, the board made his appointment permanent after its executive search. It pointed to his performance during the interim period and his knowledge of the company’s operations. A role that had begun with a temporary qualifier became his ongoing assignment.

The appointment came alongside a proposed financing of up to C$15.1 million, with VRG Capital and its associates leading the investment. On October 20, NowVertical announced that the initial C$5.1 million tranche had closed. It had binding subscription agreements for a further C$10 million tranche, which was expected to close afterward. Garber also rejoined the board, alongside incoming executive chair J.R. Kingsley Ward.

The next piece of work

Garber’s account of the company’s priorities has been relatively direct. At the August investor summit, he put commercial growth first and described a high bar for further acquisitions. For someone whose initial contribution involved assembling the business, the emphasis on organic growth was a meaningful change of task. The organization needed to win more opportunities using what it had already built.

There are other organizations in his history too. His legal biography records a founding board role at Skate to Great, a charity focused on giving children the opportunity to skate. C100’s 2020-21 membership report also lists him among its Canadian technology community. His career has involved participating in networks as well as drafting the arrangements that connect their members.

The next chapter at NowVertical will be measured through its business: customers, delivery, financing and the decisions required to keep them aligned. Garber’s route to the job offers a modestly unfashionable lesson about preparation. Years spent helping companies begin can become useful experience when a company needs to continue.

Back in Toronto, before Collision, he had a neat way of describing a successful week: enough work to keep him busy elsewhere. As chief executive, he has acquired considerably more of it.