UPRISE Festival is delighted to partner with Dublin City Council and Startup Grind to bring you our official Launch Party from City Hall.

Sean Blanchfield is CEO and co-founder of PageFair, the company at the forefront of the digital adblocking debate. He co-founded his first business, Phorest, while still an undergrad at TCD, exiting in an MBO 2 years later. In 2003, he dropped out of a PhD to co-found DemonWare.

DemonWare created P2P technology for video games, and helped drive the mainstream popularisation of multiplayer video gaming until its acquisition by Activision Blizzard in 2007. As CTO, Sean architected the online technology that powers some of the world’s most successful video games franchises.

In 2010 Sean and team witnessed first-hand the damage caused by ad blocking on their network of games websites. By 2012 they had launched PageFair to develop a sustainable publisher-focused solution to growing adblock adoption. Today, PageFair has been integrated on over 5000 websites, and is used by many leading international publishing brands.

Sean is a well-known figure in Irish technology, and is a frequent speaker, panelist, columnist, and occasional mentor and investor.