Cian is a physicist by training and an entrepreneur by experience. He founded his first company, Greener Globe, on the belief that scarcity is rarely a supply problem and almost always a design problem. The company built environmentally friendly products that cut water waste in residential and commercial settings, and within a single year it grew under his leadership into an internationally trading business spanning Europe and Asia. It was selected to represent Ireland in the SAGE World Cup, taking first prize in 2014, and through his work Cian was recognized by the President of Ireland for his innovation and leadership and named Outstanding Person of the Year by Junior Chamber International.

Academically, Cian studied a BSc in Physics at Trinity College Dublin, where he earned first class honours and a Gold Medal for academic excellence. He stayed on to pursue a PhD in nanothermal physics, but after defending his thesis he chose to leave early with an MSc and return to building, this time in the United States. That physics training left him with a first-principles instinct for hard technical problems, one that still shapes how he thinks about product and data architecture today.

At the University of Notre Dame he completed an MSc in Engineering, Science, & Technology Entrepreneurship, and along the way built his second company, Comma, which took on social media addiction through novel methods and direct integrations with academic institutions.

Before space, Cian spent years in healthcare technology, working on electronic health records and revenue cycle management at Athelas and Commure. There he learned how clinical software is really built, sold, and adopted inside live provider operations. As one of the earliest product and operations hires, he grew with the company from a team of tens to more than a thousand, and he spent countless hours sitting beside practitioners across American healthcare to understand their data infrastructure, their workflows, and their need for AI firsthand. What he took from those years is simple: clinical software lives or dies on whether it fits the way people actually work. That conviction, paired with deep technology domain knowledge and founding-stage instincts, is exactly what Astrolabe is driving into the space market.

Looking forward, his career reads as a rare blend of scientific rigor and entrepreneurial drive. Looking backward, the path seems obvious: the truest application of his curiosity about how the world works, and his compulsion to build something with that understanding, was always going to be the space industry. At Astrolabe, Cian brings the product, commercial, and operational discipline to turn a clinical foundation into a durable business.

That blend, and a chance lunch with Luke at a space conference in 2025, is how Astrolabe was born.