In artificial intelligence (AI) integration company Jentic, Sean Blanchfield believes he has founded one of the last businesses which will not be replaced by AI.
The Demonware founder and former director of the National Digital Research Centre (NDRC) joined co-founders Dorothy Creaven, Michael Cordner and Dr Tilman Schaefer to create Jentic in 2024 with some very ambitious goals.
Jentic is making software aimed at connecting AI into commercial systems in a safe way to better enable businesses’ use of the technology.
“We have identified one of the very last things that can be built that’s going to enable [the integration of AI] but not be replaced by it,” says Blanchfield.
His early interaction with AI made it clear its software generation capabilities would really “change the future of software companies”, he says.
“AI is getting so good so fast, that you think you’re selling a product to customers, but pretty soon your customers will be able to generate their own products.”
This will “totally change the game”, he says, adding that it led him to make some “fatalistic conclusions about the future of software and start-ups”.
He believes AI is “going to replace all enterprise software” and that integrating AI with commercial software will be a multibillion-euro market, with companies needing a system to go between their own data and technology and the AI platform.
He is not alone in seeing Jentic’s potential, with the company securing backing from Amazon Web Services (AWS) via its generative AI accelerator. It was the first Irish company to be selected for this and one of just 40 companies selected from more than 3,000 applicant firms. This, Blanchfield says, is a “real endorsement” of Jentic’s approach.
This came on the back of a €4 million pre-seed funding round led by private markets investment firm Elkstone and alongside angel investors including the “Irish tech mafia and a couple of rugby players”.
Bolstered by that investment, Jentic has in the past year grown from four staff to 23 and is about to move forward with its first enterprise products in the new year.
“We’re doing this for enterprises – this is where the highest-stakes data is‚” says Blanchfield. While other tech start-ups may want to “move fast and break things”, this is not Jentic’s approach, as it needs to treat high-stakes data “very very carefully”, he says.
This type of middleware technology is not new to Blanchfield: it is the type of software he has experience building, and he has built a career on this.
His entrepreneurial journey began while studying at Trinity College Dublin in 1997. He went door-to-door offering to build websites for companies shortly after the “dawn of the modern web”.
A year later, while in the final year of his degree, Blanchfield, alongside Ronan Perceval and Dylan Collins, started a group text messaging business akin to WhatsApp. That business would go on to become booking management software company Phorest, whose revenue is threatening to reach €50 million this year.
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“Phorest is quite a successful company now and is still run by Ronan 25 years later. [It] is worth an insane amount of money, employing hundreds of people, the leader in its category of solid management systems” he says.
Describing himself as the “geek of the crew”, Blanchfield says he was part-time chief technology officer at Phorest while doing a computer science PhD for 2½ years.
The doctorate focused on distributed systems, or peer-to-peer downloading, he says, explaining it examines “how not to get caught by Metallica for downloading Nothing Else Matters”.
It was during this time that the team got the idea for Demonware, inspired by Havoc, a games technology company founded out of Trinity’s computer science school that would later be acquired by Intel.
At the turn of the millennium, Blanchfield says, they noticed all of the staff and students at the computer lab in Trinity would switch from college work and Microsoft Office to playing online games as soon as it reached 5pm.
There were online video games on “nearly every screen in every computer lab”, he says.
The team realised games studios would be looking to work with someone to develop the networking software to power the gameplay.
“We can go in there and build a technology stack that solves the boring bit of moving all the traffic around the internet in real time,” he says, linking it to the work he did as part of his PhD.
That idea became Demonware, with Saturday morning management meetings held among the young Trinity graduates: BlanchfielCollins and Perceval.
The team decided to “build a networking stack for video games and sell it the same way that Havoc sells physics for video games”. Following 12 months of raising capital, Demonware was born out of €500,000 in funding.
“It’s kind of surprising that we raised money at all,” Blanchfield says, laughing. “We were basically kids saying we want to work in the video games industry, so we’re going to start a company.”
The networking technology the company created went on to power the online services for some of the most iconic video games of all time. The Call of Duty franchise is still powered by Demonware’s code stack today.
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The company was acquired by Activision Blizzard in 2007 for a seven-figure sum. It powered all of Activision’s online gaming services, including the Tony Hawk, Guitar Hero, and Spider-Man franchises. Demonware’s intellectual property was also behind some Ubisoft titles too, such as Splinter Cell and Ghost Recon.
Blanchfield stayed on at the company after the acquisition, but “it was quite a rough period” for him. Activision Blizzard had a “competitive culture”, he says. He says he struggled with the transition away from being an owner of the company.
“It was no longer my company,” he says, admitting he was still feeling the pressure of ownership and of defending his team within the new structure. “I was taking it to bed with me every night, and not sleeping as a consequence.”
He left the company less than two years after its sale.
“A good fraction of humanity has played Call of Duty or Guitar Hero at some point,” he says. “Call of Duty has made a billion a year since then and you have to attribute a decent fraction of that to Demonware.”
Blanchfield says the team “sold early, but there was no other option”. The company’s original ownership “did okay, not like retiring money or anything”. He admits he has been left with “a bit of a chip on the shoulder”.
“That was the best that companies in Ireland tended to do for a long time,” the Jentic founder says. But with his new company, he is “really keen to raise that game”.