Founder & Managing General Partner at SOSV · Joined 1995
View Live Interactive Profile →Sean O'Sullivan founded MapInfo in 1985, inventing street mapping technology for personal computers and taking the company public in 1994 - the exit that funded his second act as an investor. He founded SOSV in 1995 initially as a personal 'super angel' vehicle, investing his own money into two dozen companies before beginning to institutionalize the firm in 2007. His defining insight was that hardware and biotech founders couldn't be served by the same software-centric accelerator model that worked for internet startups, which led him to co-found HAX in 2012 and launch IndieBio in 2014 - vertical accelerators with genuine lab and fabrication infrastructure built in-house. That model made SOSV, by his own account, the world's most active investor across the US, Asia, and Europe combined in Q2 2020, a distinction few generalist venture firms could match.