Sebastian De Ro

Sebastian De Ro is an Austrian software engineer and technology executive. He is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Magic, the 2022 San Francisco artificial-intelligence company building foundation models for autonomous software engineering on the proprietary Long-Term Memory architecture, with Eric Steinberger as chief executive officer. He was previously the chief technology officer of FireStart, the Austrian business-process-management software vendor, and a co-founder of the climate-education non-profit ClimateScience.

At a glance

• Education: HTBLVA Spengergasse, Vienna, Higher Informatics program, 2013 to 2018, gifted-student promotion track ("Hochbegabtenförderung") under teacher Harald Zumpf.
• Current role: Co-founder and chief technology officer of Magic since 2022, leading engineering, infrastructure, and the Long-Term Memory model production stack.
• Previous roles: Chief technology officer at FireStart, the Linz-headquartered business-process-management software vendor, 2019 to 2022; lead developer and senior full-stack developer at twinformatics GmbH (an Austrian insurance-and-finance IT vendor), 2018 to 2019; software-engineering intern at Automic Software (later acquired by CA Technologies), 2017.
• Other affiliation: Co-founder of ClimateScience, the UK-registered climate-education charity, with Eric Steinberger and Isabel Key, in the role of co-founder and trustee since 2019.
• Key contributions: Co-founder of Magic and technical lead on the August 2024 LTM-2-mini announcement reporting a 100-million-token context window; technical leadership on Magic's training and inference infrastructure.
• X / Twitter: @SebastianDeRo
• LinkedIn: sebastiandero
• GitHub: sebastiandero
• Personal site: sebastiandero.com

Origins

De Ro is from Vienna, Austria. He attended HTBLVA Spengergasse, a federal higher technical school in central Vienna, from 2013 to 2018 in the Higher Informatics ("Höhere Informatik") track, graduating with a Matura-equivalent qualification at the end of the five-year program. He was admitted to the school's gifted-student promotion track ("Hochbegabtenförderung") under teacher Harald Zumpf, a structured program for students with exceptional aptitude in computer science and mathematics. The same cohort included Eric Steinberger, with whom De Ro built a long-running collaboration that began at the school and continued through ClimateScience and Magic.

The Spengergasse period produced the formative episode that has been recounted in subsequent industry coverage. Over a summer break, De Ro and Steinberger consolidated all of the school computers into a single classroom and used the assembled hardware as a small training cluster for early machine-learning experiments. The episode is recurrently cited in Trending Topics and brutkasten coverage of the Magic founding story as the origin of the technical partnership.

The first publicly documented professional engagement is a software-engineering internship at Automic Software in Vienna in mid-2017, where De Ro worked on an Agile development team building components in the Java and Spring stack. Automic was acquired by CA Technologies later that year for approximately 600 million euros.

Career

After graduating from HTBLVA Spengergasse in 2018, De Ro joined twinformatics GmbH, the in-house IT services subsidiary of the Vienna Insurance Group, in 2018. He moved through junior, senior full-stack developer, and lead developer positions over the year that followed.

In 2019 De Ro joined FireStart, the Linz-headquartered Austrian business-process-management software vendor, as a development lead. The company had raised a 4-million-euro Series A in 2019 from Paua Ventures (Berlin) and Capital300 (Vienna) to scale its BPM-and-workflow-automation suite for the European mid-market. De Ro was appointed vice president of technology and then chief technology officer over the 2019 to 2022 period. The technology organization approximately doubled in size during his tenure, and the team built and released FireStart Cloud, the next-generation cloud-native version of the BPM platform.

Parallel to the FireStart period, De Ro co-founded ClimateScience with Eric Steinberger and Isabel Key in 2019. The non-profit, registered as a UK charity headquartered in London, produces free climate-education courses, videos, and children's books in multiple languages and is described in industry coverage as the world's largest climate-education platform. De Ro has retained a co-founder and trustee role through the Magic period.

In 2022 De Ro and Eric Steinberger co-founded Magic, with De Ro taking the chief technology officer role and Steinberger the chief executive officer role. The founding thesis was that long-context-window scaling, rather than parameter scaling alone, is the principal architectural lever for autonomous software-engineering capability and a credible path toward artificial general intelligence. The company is headquartered in San Francisco; De Ro continues to operate principally from Vienna, with a substantial portion of the engineering organization built out of European time zones.

The Magic fundraising trajectory has been aggressive. The 23-million-dollar seed of summer 2023 was followed by a 117-million-dollar Series A in February 2024 led by NFDG Ventures, the Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross investing partnership, with CapitalG and Elad Gil. The 320-million-dollar round of August 2024 added Eric Schmidt, Atlassian, Jane Street, Sequoia Capital, and others, bringing cumulative capital to approximately 466 million dollars at a reported 1.5-billion-dollar valuation. The August 2024 LTM-2-mini announcement coincided with the funding disclosure and reported a 100-million-token context window with a sequence-dimension algorithm approximately 1,000 times more efficient than transformer attention at that context size. De Ro is the technical lead on the production-engineering side of the LTM stack, with the chief-technology-officer responsibilities spanning training infrastructure, inference deployment, and the security-and-compliance posture required for enterprise distribution.

Affiliations

• HTBLVA Spengergasse: Higher Informatics program, gifted-student promotion track, 2013 to 2018.
• Automic Software (acquired by CA Technologies, late 2017): Software-engineering intern, mid-2017.
• twinformatics GmbH: Junior Java developer, senior full-stack developer, then lead developer, 2018 to 2019.
• FireStart: Development lead, vice president of technology, then chief technology officer, 2019 to 2022.
• ClimateScience: Co-founder and trustee, 2019 to present.
• Magic: Co-founder and chief technology officer, 2022 to present.

Notable contributions

De Ro's public contribution record concentrates in the engineering, infrastructure, and product-delivery side of the Magic founding rather than in published academic research. The contributions below are the public artifacts of record.

• Magic (2022). Co-founder and chief technology officer of the LTM-architecture lab. Technical leadership on the production training stack, the inference platform, and the August 2024 LTM-2-mini release.
• LTM-2-mini announcement (August 2024). Public Magic blog post and technical demonstration of the 100-million-token context window. The HashHop benchmark released alongside the announcement is the only Magic-published evaluation artifact as of May 2026.
• FireStart Cloud (2019 to 2022). Cloud-native next-generation version of the FireStart business-process-management platform. De Ro was the senior engineering leader on the development through the chief-technology-officer role.
• ClimateScience (2019). Co-founder of the UK-registered climate-education charity. Multilingual course library, video content, and children's-book series.
• PokerRL contributions. De Ro contributed to the PokerRL codebase that anchored Steinberger's collaboration with Noam Brown at Facebook AI Research.
• Public-talk record. AustrianStartups Summit panel with Christian Trummer of Bitpanda on building products in the age of AI (April 2023); appearance with Eric Steinberger on the Trending Topics podcast on the founding story (February 2023). De Ro has appeared less frequently than Steinberger in English-language podcast and conference contexts.

Investments and boards

Entries below are limited to AI, semiconductors, datacenters, software, and energy.

• Magic (AI): Co-founder and chief technology officer, 2022 to present. Cumulative funding through April 2026 approximately 466 million dollars at a reported 1.5-billion-dollar valuation.
• ClimateScience (Software / Education): Co-founder and trustee, 2019 to present. UK registered charity producing climate-education content.

No other public investor activity on record in AI, semiconductors, datacenters, software, or energy as of May 2026.

Network

De Ro's longest-running professional partnership is with Eric Steinberger, his Magic and ClimateScience co-founder. The pair met at HTBLVA Spengergasse in the early 2010s under teacher Harald Zumpf in the gifted-student promotion track and have collaborated continuously since the school years. Isabel Key, the third ClimateScience co-founder, is the other long-running professional relationship documented from the pre-Magic period.

The Magic senior team includes Russ Salakhutdinov as chief scientist, the Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science and former director of AI research at Apple from 2016 to 2020. Salakhutdinov joined the Magic Chief Scientist role in 2024. The Austrian-engineering cohort that came through the FireStart and Vienna business-software ecosystem provides a continuing recruiting source for the Magic engineering organization. The Magic investor base, including Eric Schmidt, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Elad Gil, partners at CapitalG, Sequoia Capital, Atlassian, and Jane Street, defines the broader strategic-and-financial network through the successive funding rounds.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, De Ro occupies a structurally distinctive position among coding-AI insurgent-lab co-founders through the combination of the Austrian-technical-school engineering credential, the FireStart enterprise-software operating experience, the long-running partnership with Eric Steinberger, and the chief-technology-officer responsibility for the Magic LTM production stack. The career arc through HTBLVA Spengergasse, twinformatics, FireStart, and Magic is unusual among the broader insurgent-lab co-founder cohort, which is dominated by US- and UK-trained doctoral researchers from frontier labs.

The Magic founding pair has been characterized in industry coverage, including Trending Topics, brutkasten, and TechCrunch, as one of the principal Austrian export stories of the LLM-era founding wave, alongside Bitpanda from the cryptocurrency-exchange cohort and the broader Vienna deep-tech ecosystem. The chief-technology-officer responsibilities at Magic place De Ro alongside the technical-co-founder cohort at peer coding-AI insurgent labs, including Cursor (Anysphere), poolside, Cognition AI, and Reflection AI, with the LTM architectural thesis differentiating Magic from the transformer-and-scale orthodoxy that dominates most of the cohort.

Outlook

Open questions over the next 6 to 18 months:

• LTM-3 and successor model release. Capability profile of the next-generation LTM model relative to peer commercial coding-AI offerings, and the engineering scope of the production stack De Ro leads.
• Magic commercial product launch. Whether Magic launches a broadly available autonomous-coding product comparable to Cursor or GitHub Copilot, and the role of the chief-technology-officer function in the product-engineering organization.
• Engineering-organization scale. Whether the Magic engineering organization continues the European-time-zone build-out and whether De Ro's Vienna-based posture remains the operational anchor for the technical-leadership role.
• Atlassian strategic relationship. Whether the Atlassian investor position produces a commercial integration with the Atlassian developer-platform products (Jira, Bitbucket).
• Series-D successor financing. Whether Magic raises a follow-on round at a higher valuation, the lead-investor profile, and the cumulative-capital level relative to insurgent-cohort peers.
• Public-profile cadence. Whether De Ro maintains the relatively low English-language public-speaking profile or steps further into the Magic narrative in conference and podcast contexts.

Sources

• Sebastian De Ro LinkedIn profile. Public profile listing the Magic, ClimateScience, FireStart, twinformatics, and Automic Software roles.
• Sebastian De Ro on X (@SebastianDeRo). Public X account, the primary public channel for his commentary.
• Sebastian De Ro GitHub. Public GitHub profile listing the @magicproduct affiliation and earlier open-source contributions.
• Sebastian De Ro personal site. Self-published biographical and contact information.
• Sebastian De Ro Sequoia Capital founder page. Lead-investor founder profile listing his role at Magic.
• Sebastian De Ro at TheOrg. Organizational profile listing the education and career trajectory through Automic Software, twinformatics, FireStart, and Magic.
• Erfolgsstory der Hochbegabtenförderung – Die Gründer von Magic.dev. HTBLVA Spengergasse press release on the gifted-student promotion track that produced the Magic co-founders.
• Das ist der Lehrer, der Startup-Magic möglich macht: Harald Zumpf. Trending Topics article on the HTL Spengergasse teacher Harald Zumpf and the gifted-student promotion track.
• Richtig magisch: Zwei Wiener mischen die AI-Welt auf. Trending Topics profile on the two Vienna founders and the Magic founding story.
• Magic.dev: Die Gründer der österreichischen AI-Sensation im Exklusiv-Podcast. Trending Topics podcast episode (February 2023) with both Magic co-founders.
• magic.dev: 117 Mio. US-Dollar Investment für KI-Startup von zwei Wiener Gründern. brutkasten coverage of the February 2024 Series A.
• Magic: In Wien gegründetes KI-Startup holt 320 Mio. US-Dollar Investment. brutkasten coverage of the August 2024 round.
• TechCrunch: Generative AI coding startup Magic lands $320M investment. August 2024 funding-round coverage.
• Magic AI Secures $117 Million to Build an AI Software Engineer. Maginative coverage of the February 2024 Series A.
• Magic blog: 100M Token Context Windows. August 2024 LTM-2-mini announcement and HashHop benchmark.
• FireStart official site. The Linz-headquartered Austrian BPM software vendor where De Ro served as chief technology officer from 2019 to 2022.
• ClimateScience official site. Organizational details on the climate-education non-profit De Ro co-founded with Eric Steinberger and Isabel Key.
• Sebastian De Ro AustrianStartups Summit speaking post. LinkedIn post documenting his April 2023 panel appearance with Christian Trummer of Bitpanda.