Julie Cordua is CEO of Thorn, a nonprofit tech organization and a 2019 TED Audacious grant winner with a goal to eliminate child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from the open web. Under Julie’s leadership, Thorn has created products and programs that are deployed globally and have helped identify thousands of child victims of abuse. The company has forged key partnerships across the technology industry, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and law enforcement to turn data into insights that inform Thorn’s solutions in the fight against child abuse.

The company’s first commercial product, Safer, is the result of continuous collaboration across the child protection ecosystem to detect, remove, and report child sexual abuse imagery at scale. Safer has already enabled the removal of over one million images of child sexual abuse.

Technology and social change are Julie’s passions. For nearly a decade, she has driven Thorn’s unique model as an innovation-fueled nonprofit that brings collaborative, technology-led responses and systems-level approaches to combating online child sexual exploitation. Previously, she served as VP of Marketing/Communications at (RED) and helped establish the brand as one of the most successful cause marketing initiatives in history, working with a team to deliver more than $160 million to fight AIDS in Africa. Prior to joining (RED), she spent nearly a decade in the wireless industry. Julie holds a B.A. in Communications from UCLA and an M.B.A. from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.