Dr. John Whelan

John Whelan holds a BSc in Applied Physics and Electronics and a PhD in Applied Geophysics, both from NUI, Galway. Upon graduation he worked in software design and development for a range of companies in financial services, based in Ireland and Japan. These include Davy Stockbrokers and Daiwa Securities. Then he went on to found a number of tech start-ups, riding the internet bubble in 1999 and 2000 and raising significant venture capital. He then settled down with the third which was most successful being Aalto technologies . Alatto traded for 9 years with sales averaging over €1m per year . More recently consultant to Vodafone Ireland for one year and then in 2008 became Technology Transfer Case Manager at Trinity College, Dublin responsible for commercialisation of IT/web research. I now run Trinity College’s startup accelerator LaunchBox and I am also Executive Director of Blackstone LaunchPad at Trinity College, Dublin.