Sebastian "Seb" Haigh

Sebastian "Seb" Haigh is a technology entrepreneur, investor, and author. Seb began his career early, working on his parents' farm before taking on roles in the hotel business, contract farming, and gardening. His first high-tech role involved programming industrial robots, where he developed a method that significantly improved quality assurance metrics. Seb went on to co-found multiple technology ventures, launch an award-winning talent accelerator in Oxford, and lead product teams at companies including HP and Amazon. He has also advised business and government leaders on technology investments exceeding two billion dollars.

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Seb was born in Papua New Guinea and returned to the UK for schooling at Bishop of Hereford's Bluecoat School and Kelly College in Devon. He studied Philosophy, Psychology, Mathematics, and Computer Science at Leeds University, graduating with a BSc in Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence. At Leeds, he received a prestigious Nuffield Studentship for his thesis on Automatic Extraction of Tagset Mappings from Parallel-Annotated Corpora.

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In 1995, Seb joined Online as an early employee, where he developed game engine platforms. The company floated on London’s AIM market 18 months later and rose to become a dotcom star before the 2000 crash. Seb then joined Serverware Group, first as lead developer and later as project lead for major clients such as BP, Shell, the UK Government, Lloyds Bank, and Microsoft USA. Serverware’s product, now known as EMC Server Configuration Manager, was acquired by Fundamental Software in a multi-million-dollar deal.

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From 2000 to 2003, Seb was seconded as a deployment consultant to Trilogy Inc., a renowned tech talent hub featured in Rolling Stone and Harvard Business Review. Working in Paris, London, and Washington DC, he led an in-house startup team at SITA-Equant, transforming its sales operations. Returning to the UK, Seb co-founded CMBridge, a consulting firm specializing in Enterprise Configuration Management, landing major contracts with Hutchison 3G, the NHS, Carphone Warehouse, and Siemens.

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While on sabbatical in 2004, Seb identified an opportunity to scale US-based Web 2.0 platforms internationally. He led the global expansion of the RateMy web properties developed by Michael Hussey. RateMyTeachers and RateMyProfessors gained widespread attention, including front-page press and parliamentary debate. RateMyProfessors was acquired by Viacom and RateMyTeachers by a private equity firm, both in multi-million-dollar deals.

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When CMBridge technology was adopted in the UK MOD’s Atlas Defence Information Infrastructure program, Seb joined consortium leader EDS. A planned two-year role evolved into a decade of software-intensive business transformation with clients including Vodafone, Rolls-Royce, and Ahold. Seb co-created HP’s Agile Digital Customer Experience (DCX) practice, growing it from a startup to $10M+ in new business within a year. His team won several awards including Oracle Middleware Partner of the Year and Telco Website of the Year (three times). During his tenure at EDS and HP, Seb was a frequent industry speaker and co-authored reports with Accenture, Frost & Sullivan, and Gartner.

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Seb later led product management for the official Formula 1 app and pioneered open procurement systems at Amazon Ltd. He remains active in global startup ecosystems with investments and advisory roles across California, Michigan, New York, Oxford, London, Luxembourg, Ukraine, Qatar, India, Pakistan, China, and Singapore. He is co-founder and board member at Oxford Accelerator (NACUE Innovation Award winner, 2017) and Oxford.AI. His investments and board roles span companies including StatSocial, PeekYou, Onfido, Maple Intelligence, NodeGear, Buysta, Mavra, Yell, and others.

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