Ian Shea

Ian Shea is the co-founder of MNX, where he is chief technology officer, and Manifold Markets, a social prediction-market platform. His work has included blockchain applications, computer-vision systems, research software, and mobile apps.^[1]​

Education

Shea studied computer science at the University of Texas at Austin from 2014 to 2016. Before that, he studied food science and technology at Virginia Tech from 2009 to 2014, earning a Bachelor of Science degree and a minor in chemistry. He also took part in study-abroad programs: life-sciences study at the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela in Spain in 2012, and Spanish language and literature study at the University of Deusto from 2011 to 2012.^[1]

Career

Tutoring and Laboratory Experience

From May to August 2013, Ian Shea interned at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia. His responsibilities included working with mice, performing necropsies, conducting polymerase chain reaction (PCR) procedures, applying laboratory techniques, and isolating genetic material.

From September 2013 to April 2014, he worked as a laboratory intern at Matson Laboratory. His work included cell culture, treatment, cell counting, experimental design, microscopy, and cell analysis.

From September 2013 to April 2015, Shea provided private organic chemistry tutoring while attending Virginia Tech. From July 2014 to April 2015, he also worked as a biology tutor at Sylvan Learning.

Comparative RNA Lab

From August 2015 to January 2016, Shea worked as a software developer in the Comparative RNA Lab. He contributed to software for RNA secondary-structure folding that used distance measures, statistical likelihoods, and an SQL database of RNA structures. He also developed RNA-folding visualizations in Java.

Computational Visualization and Research

From November 2015 to January 2017, Shea worked as a Moncrief intern and researcher at the University of Texas at Austin's Computational Visualization Center. He conducted parallel-computing experiments using molecular modeling and protein-protein docking on supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to investigate free-energy changes associated with cancer.

He developed a computational pipeline to refine the X-ray crystal structure of the Zika virus envelope protein. The work involved sampling Ramachandran plots and fitting the results to an electron-micrograph density map.

His research also involved applying machine learning to identify active sites and rerank protein-protein docking results. He calculated backbone-atom root-mean-square deviation (RMSD) using Python and performed statistical analyses in R.

Independent Software Development

From January to September 2017, Shea worked as a self-employed iOS developer in the Austin, Texas, metropolitan area. He developed VPedals, an application combining computer vision and audio effects.

Blue Alloy Labs

Shea cofounded Blue Alloy Labs in Boulder, Colorado, and led product development from January 2017 to November 2019. His work included Eyeflite Ava, an application published on the Oculus App Store using Oculus Keys and supported by a multi-service backend written in Go. He also developed and published an iOS text-to-speech application with a Python speech-synthesis backend.

For the SaferPool Smart Camera, Shea designed, tested, and trained computer vision models using Python, TensorFlow, and OpenCV. He developed an iOS application in Swift to receive server-generated alerts and designed and implemented HaveASaferPool.com using HTML5, CSS, Adobe Illustrator, and Python-Django.

Shea also worked on augmented-reality applications. Siv displayed animated nutritional information over grocery products, while Assembly presented animated furniture-assembly instructions over individual furniture pieces. During this period, he participated in Cohort 10 of the Boomtown Accelerator.

Corroborator

From November 2019 to September 2020, Shea cofounded Corroborator and served as its chief technology officer. He developed applications using React Native, Vue, and Ethereum to help police departments establish the provenance and integrity of photographic and video evidence.

Shea led a team that received three awards from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) program, with a combined value exceeding $90,000. One of the awards was the Corroborator Seed and Progress Award, which included a $30,000 seed award.

Etherize

Shea cofounded Etherize in November 2019 and served as its lead full-stack developer until May 2022. He developed Etherize.io, a service for hybrid entity formation, using TypeScript, Solidity, and Go.

Bluterra

From September 2020 to May 2022, Shea served as cofounder and chief technology officer of Bluterra. His work involved developing artificial intelligence and computer vision models to analyze the composition of recyclable materials and organic waste in waste streams. The project also included consumer education about the effects of recycling habits.

Manifold Markets

Shea cofounded Manifold Markets in April 2022. Founded in 2021, the platform operates as a social prediction game in which users create and participate in markets using play money. Topics include news, politics, technology, and artificial intelligence. The company reported $3 million in total funding from a single previous round.

MNX

Shea is a cofounder and chief technology officer of MNX, a decentralized exchange under development on MegaETH, a layer 2 network. The platform is designed to offer perpetual contracts and prediction markets related to artificial intelligence (AI), including markets for computing resources, company valuations, and AI performance metrics. MNX was established by the founding team of Manifold Markets.

On February 21, 2026, Shea described MNX as a trading platform covering different parts of the AI industry, including H100 rental prices and markets related to Nvidia. On October 13, 2026, he announced the platform's launch and referred to it as an exchange for AI-related assets. The announcement included futures associated with private companies such as OpenAI.

MNX's products include futures linked to the valuations of private companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, perpetual contracts on AI-related equities such as Nvidia, and prediction markets covering H100 computing rental rates and AI benchmark performance. Its trading infrastructure uses batch auctions at 200-millisecond intervals, unified margin accounts that permit the use of collateral across assets, and leverage of up to 50 times. Smart contracts are used to hold user funds without centralized custody. Trading requires users to connect a wallet and deposit collateral.

On June 9, 2026, MNX raised €5.71 million in a pre-seed funding round. Listed investors and participants included Finality Capital Partners, North Island Ventures, Village Global, Cambrian Network, Scott Moore, Grant Hummer, Travis Scher, Jason Zhao, Ansgar Dietrichs, Dwarkesh Patel, Multimodal, and Macroscopic Ventures. ^{[1] [2] [3]}