Barry Downes

Mr. Barry Downes is an experienced software industry executive, technologist, entrepreneur and technology investor. Mr Downes is a co-founder and the Managing Partner of Sure Valley Ventures (SVV). Previously, Mr. Downes co-founded Pluto Digital PLC (Pluto) a leader in Web 3.0 Metaverse and Decentralised Finance (DeFI) technologies and prior to that he also founded FeedHenry, a leader in mobile cloud technologies, which was sold to Red Hat Inc in 2014. He was also previously the CEO of the leading academic software research and futurist institute the Walton Institute, which worked with many of the top Silicon Valley and European global software companies on advanced technology research and futurist projects.

Mr. Downes has extensive domain experience in Web 3.0 decentralised systems, Metaverse, DeFi, artificial intelligence and security technologies and he is also an advisor to the European Commission’s European Innovation Council (EIC), which is focused on developing Europe’s next unicorns and which has an allocated budget of over €1 billion.

Mr. Downes holds a BSc in Applied Computing from Waterford Institute of Technology, an MBA from Smurfit Business School, University College Dublin and executive qualifications from Henley Business School in the UK, Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkley, in Venture Capital. Mr. Downes is also a Certified Investment Fund Director (CIFD), awarded by the Institute of Banking (IOB) and he is also registered with the FCA.