30 years in AI and SaaS

A blend of academic AI and SaaS hands-on leadership

For over three decades I have been a student of AI, whilst building a career founding and exiting a number of SaaS startups.

AI Student

BSc AI 93-96
     
MSc ALife 04-06
  • 1993 - 1996: Student at Birmingham University, awarded BSc (Hons) in Artificial Intelligence.
  • 1996 - 2004: Studied Complexity Science independently with a particular passion for neural networks and emergence.
  • 2004 - 2006: Studied at Sussex University, award an MSc (Hons) in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems.
  • 2006 - 2022: Maintained an active passion in AI and robotics – researching machine learning and building various robots.
  • 2022 - now: 100% focus on modern AI: building enterprise solutions with LLMs and exploring Agentic AI.

Founding CTO for 4 successful startups

Opsbase Founding CTO / 2019 - 2022
Acquired by Ideagen PLC Checklist SaaS for Health & Safety sector React [Native] - GraphQL - NodeJS - AWS 5 Devs . 2 Design . 8 Other
Genie Mobile Founding CTO / 2010 - 2015
Acquired by Lanyon PLC Mobile App Builder for the Events sector Dojo - Objective C - Java - GCP 15 Devs . 3 Design . 22 Other
Acorn Ecommerce Founding CTO / 2000 - 2009
Acquired by Pindar PLC Website Builder for the Etail sector Javascript - VB.NET - IIS - MS SQL 4 Devs . 1 Design . 2 Other
Property Center Founding Dev / 1996 - 1999
Acquired by NAEA Property Search SaaS for the Realtor sector Javascript - Perl - IIS - MS SQL 1 Devs . 1 Design . 2 Other

Building full-stack SaaS

I built my first commercial web app in 1996 and have built web and mobile apps ever since.

During the GenieMobile business, we published over 1,500 mobile apps with total downloads in the millions.

Across all my apps, I have served thousands of customers, millions of users, and billions of requests.

Over the years, I have mastered numerous frameworks and languages—including Javascript, Typescript, React, Angular, NodeJS, NextJS, React Native, Java, Perl, and Python.

I have defined, architected, and developed all tiers of the app backends from the database to the API.

Each backend has complied with the highest levels of enterprise-grade security.

Including fully observable GraphQL APIs as well as traditional RESTful services, more recent backends have been fully cloud hosted in AWS or GCP.

As founding CTO, I have built and directed numerous dev teams and led those teams from within.