Sean O'Sullivan

Founder

Sean O’Sullivan founded SOSV in 1995 to invest into private technology startups. In 2007, Sean began aggressively expanding SOSV, transitioning it from a Sean O'Sullivan personal investment vehicle into a venture capital organisation which today has over 90 staff supporting investments in over 150 new startups every year. In 2018, SOSV has 8 general partners, operating globally, with SOSV’s major offices in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Taipei, San Francisco, New York, Cork, and London.

Sean O’Sullivan got his entrepreneurial start in 1985 as a founder of MapInfo, bringing street mapping technology to personal computers. MapInfo went on to become a $200 million public company with over 1,000 employees worldwide. In 1996, while at the helm of his second company, NetCentric, he created “software for inside the Internet” and is credited with co-creating the term “cloud computing” alongside George Favaloro from Compaq.

Sean has continued as a visionary entrepreneur and investor, creating and supporting a range of business, humanitarian and educational endeavors. A major promoter of economic and social development, he founded JumpStart International in 2003. JumpStart was a leading humanitarian engineering organisation based in Baghdad and which operated throughout Iraq during the post-war period of 2003-2006. He spent a few years running JumpStart, which for a time had a staff of over 3000, running up to 80 projects at a time in Fallujah, Najaf and the Baghdad region. As benefactor of the http://sosf.us/, Sean has also been a primary funder of organisations such as the http://www.khanacademy.org/, Mathletes and CoderDojo.

As founding Chairman of the Irish Entrepreneurship Forum and founder of Open Ireland, he has been a leader and influencer of Irish government policy in fueling economic growth and recovery in the technology sector. Sean was a regular investment panelist on the popular RTÉ TV show Dragon’s Den, and occasional columnist for the Sunday Business Post.

Sean holds a Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Masters of Fine Arts in Film Production from the University of Southern California.