Gary Hughes is co-founder and CEO of Teckro. He is an entrepreneur who has successfully launched two global companies in Ireland – more than a decade ahead of the start-up boom and withstanding the dot-com bust.

Combining a passion for design with love of technology, Gary is influenced by Dieter Rams’ principles of good design. He co-founded Teckro with a motivation to make an impact and the belief that clinical research needs to be simpler and more accessible.

Gary started his career in the budding e-learning market in the mid 1990s, first working at Dublin-based Interactive Services as a graphic designer. Gary later relocated to the US to gain international experience. Here he worked as a program manager for Microsoft on their Step-by-Step Interactive Training programs before moving back to Ireland to join an early stage start-up based in Galway as one of its first employees. It was a formative experience that led Gary to start Firecrest Clinical in 2001 along with Nigel Hughes and Jacek Skrzypiec.

At its inception, Firecrest was an e-learning solution that provided online training for healthcare professionals. By 2004, Firecrest evolved into an investigator portal – one of the first site-facing solutions in the market. In 2011, after a decade, Gary and the Firecrest management team accepted an acquisition offer from ICON, one of the world’s largest clinical research organizations.

Post-acquisition, Gary remained with ICON for a couple of years as Executive Vice President. In this time, he gained a greater appreciation for the scale of the problems facing modern drug development processes. Inspired for a second time, Gary, along with co-founders Nigel and Jacek, started Teckro in 2015. Today, Teckro has more than 150 employees across Europe and the United States, with ambitious future growth plans.