Tiarnan Conlon

Tiarnan Conlon is the founder of Horizon IR, a Northern Irish startup helping machinery manufacturers scale their aftersales support through knowledge distribution. Before founding Horizon IR he spent six years as an automation engineer and engineering manager with a NI machinery builder, diagnosing control, electrical and hydraulic faults on customer sites, usually with production stopped and an unhappy customer watching. Repeatedly being the one person who could resolve the faults others couldn't led to the question behind his current work: why does fault-finding knowledge live in a handful of heads when most of the answers are already written down in the machine's own engineering documentation? He combines that hands-on experience with an electrical engineering and software background from a 1st class MSCI from Queen's University Belfast. He graduated first in his class while winning awards for his final year project developing computer vision algorithms before working for a number of Belfast based software companies.