Osman is an influential serial technology entrepreneur and a deep tech VC, with a singular purpose of making Europe and the UK self-sufficient in AI technologies – from chips to models to pylons.
He is best known as the co-founder and CEO of 3Dlabs – one time an almost $1B company listed on NASDAQ. 3Dlabs was a European fabless chip company from the UK which started the 3D graphics revolution on the PC in the ‘90s and was the inventor of the GPU chip. 3Dlabs enabled the PC to become a direct competitor to Silicon Graphics in late 90s (SGI was Apple of the time) and led to SGI’s eventual demise.
In early 2000s, 3Dlabs paved the way for GPUs to become AI accelerators by developing and donating to the industry its OpenGL ‘programmable shaders’ which became the foundation for massively parallel AI programming on GPUs many years later.
Prior to 3Dlabs, Osman was the co-founder of benchmark Technologies, which was acquired in 1988 by DuPont corporation. DuPont’s intent was to harness benchMark’s VLIW Graphics, Image and Floating Point processors for graphics workstations and for the then nascent AI Neural Networks. DuPont was an early adopter of AI for process control in some of its chemical plants.
Osman is a visionary technologist, a successful business leader and a deal maker with around $500M of equity and license transactions under his belt as an entrepreneur, prior to becoming a VC – including six exits and an IPO. In 2012, Business Insider magazine cited him as one of the top 15 technologists in the West.
Since 2018, Osman has been a VC Partner at Atlantic Bridge Capital (SambaNova, Nuvia, Syntiant, Dispelix, Cambridge Mechatronics etc) where he focuses on investments in foundational AI and chips. Atlantic Bridge Capital, born in Ireland, is one of Europe’s pre-eminent deep technology VC funds with $1.5B of assets under management and 4 recent Unicorns (and one Unicorn exit).
Over the years, Osman also established an informal network of hundreds of deep-tech companies ranging from AI chips to photonics to quantum to next generation AI around the world, which he mentors as needed. He has a particular interest in applications of these technologies for the ‘good of the world’.
He’s been the Vice President of the Deep Tech Summit by Tech Tour for many years – the premiere European event for Deep Technology companies and investors which select top technology companies every year from around 500 applicants in Europe. Osman is also a senior advisor to Silverpeak, the premiere boutique technology investment bank based in London, helping companies with fund raising and M&A transactions.
He is an accomplished musician, composer and a music producer and lives in a famous music studio near London, originally built for Roxy Music
He has a First Class degree in Computer Science and Electronics Engineering from University of Birmingham and is the inventor of 21 granted US patents in the fields of computing, GPUs and cloud computing.
In 2016 Osman received ‘Freedom of City of London’ for services to IT - which is the British way of bestowing the honorary key to a city.
