About
Tony Kelly is the former CEO of DemonWare, the Irish-founded online services company behind some of the biggest videogame brands in the world, including Call of Duty, Destiny, and Guitar Hero.
Over 25+ years, Tony has designed, built, and operated internet-scale digital products across startups, scale-ups, and multinationals. Products he has worked on have won 40+ national and international awards, including BAFTAs and a United Nations World Information Technology Summit Award. He has credits on 150+ videogame titles.
His experience spans AI/ML/LLMs, edtech,fintech, blockchain, cloud infrastructure, esports, ecommerce and media — consistently delivering high-performance, high-uptime services at scale. His current work focuses on AI-powered product development, including production LLM applications, agentic AI systems, and RAG architectures, as well as core protocol development at Concordium, a Layer-1 blockchain.
Tony's involvement in educational technology runs deep. His career began at Intel's IT Innovation Centre, where he designed and delivered e-learning platforms for global deployment — work recognised with the UN World Information Technology Summit E-learning Award in 2003. He has since produced innovation learning content for MasterCard and Microsoft, and is currently building two AI-powered edtech products: MethodPunks, an AI product management platform, and CiceroneAI, an AI language learning application.
At DemonWare/Activision-Blizzard, Tony scaled infrastructure to support 600M+ users and served as the infrastructure and cloud subject matter expert on Activision's senior leadership team. He helped architect Activision-Blizzard's online, ecommerce, and big data strategy, and played a key role in bringing the Call of Duty franchise to China with Tencent. He grew DemonWare from a $1.5M per year cost centre to approximately $1Bn per year in revenue contribution, and delivered $104M in cost savings through strategic infrastructure insourcing. During this period, he built and led a product management office of 17 PMs, maintained 96% staff retention through 4x headcount growth, and sat on Activision's M&A committee.
Through his consultancy Spicebox.io, Tony provides fractional CTO and CPO services to startups, scale-ups, and enterprises. He has delivered across 20+ engagements spanning fintech, edtech, gaming, pharma, and enterprise SaaS, with clients including Microsoft, Mastercard, Disney, AMD, Nokia, and Enterprise Ireland. He has also had a number of successful exits as an angel investor, with portfolio companies acquired by Sophos, Amazon, and others.
Tony has hands-on experience working in regulated sectors — PII, PCI DSS, GDPR, GDPR-K, COPPA, CCPA, MiCA, SOC-2, ISO 27001 — and has consulted at national and EU level on privacy and data protection, payments, tokenisaiton, in-app purchases, open source, videogaming, esports, igaming, and cybersecurity.
