# Martin McKeaveney

![Martin McKeaveney](/resources/cognition/portraits/martin-mckeaveney.webp)

FrontierCode pod lead and OSS engineer at Cognition | Co-founder & former CTO of Budibase | Founder, Soria Labs  
Soria Labs  
Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

## At Cognition

- Role: Engineering (Engineering)
- Joined: Jun 2025
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: CTO & Co-Founder, Autonurture AI

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-mckeaveney-59bb669a
- X: @martinmck_
- GitHub: https://github.com/shogunpurple
- Website: https://martinmck.com

## Notes
- Posted that FrontierCode was used in Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 release: "The benchmark used to test it's capability was built by our team at Cognition. We've been working on it for over a year - creating and designing the spec and infrastructure to run it from scratch." He also wrote: "Building FrontierCode alongside this team and seeing it used and trusted by Anthropic has been some of the proudest work so far." (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/martin-mckeaveney-59bb669a_anthropic-released-claude-fable-5-this-week-activity-7471094279923429376-uk_r)
- Joined Cognition in June 2025 in an Engineering role (LinkedIn); his GitHub bio frames it as 'OSS Engineer @CognitionAI'. (https://github.com/shogunpurple)
- Cognition's SWE-1.6 preview post singles him out among 'members of our contractor team who have made outsized contributions to data & tooling' (with Claudio Costa, Lance Fuchia, Tomer Nosrati, Merlijn Vos). (https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-6-preview)
- Featured maintainer on Cognition's FrontierCode benchmark launch (credited as 'Co-Founder and CTO of Budibase (28k stars)'), quoted: “What sets FrontierCode apart is the attention to detail. Each task is calibrated to a depth that simply hasn’t been seen before in LLM benchmarking. We should be moving away from benchmarks that can be gamed and instead using ones like FrontierCode to demonstrate genuine model intelligence and creativity.”. (https://cognition.com/blog/frontier-code)
- Listed as a pod lead (asterisked) in the FrontierCode 2.0 acknowledgments alongside Claudio Costa, Tomer Nosrati, Merlijn Vos and Cristiam Da Silva. (https://cognition.com/blog/frontier-code-2.0)
- Co-founded Budibase (open-source low-code/internal tools platform, Belfast, founded 2019) with Joe Johnston and Mike Shanks; he served as CTO Jan 2020 to Sep 2025. (https://tracxn.com/d/companies/budibase)
- A newsletter profile describes Budibase as '(acquired)' and lists him as Founder @ Soria Labs with 1.5 years at Cognition. (https://stealthmodefounders.com/p/9-7-26-top-founders-of-the-week)
- Founded Soria Labs in January 2026 and is CTO & co-founder of Autonurture AI (2025); his posts pitch workflow-first AI adoption for recruitment and legal firms. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/martin-mckeaveney-59bb669a_ive-been-programming-since-a-young-age-activity-7494996610725171200-2157)
- Same post: "It's humbling and frankly quite insane to see your work referenced in a frontier model release." and described working with 20+ open-source maintainers across 36 repositories, with Diamond-tier scores around 13% for Opus 4.8 and around 30% for Fable. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/martin-mckeaveney-59bb669a_anthropic-released-claude-fable-5-this-week-activity-7471094279923429376-uk_r)
- Described his current mix of work as: "I see this from all angles; building enterprise software for governments and banks, doing AI research, and running AI agents day to day for recruitment and legal firms." (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/martin-mckeaveney-59bb669a_ive-been-programming-since-a-young-age-activity-7494996610725171200-2157)
- Public headline says "I help enterprises save 1000s of hours lost to admin, by mapping workflows before introducing AI | 3000 hours saved and counting | Founder @ Soria Labs | Founder @ Autonurture AI | Frontier AI research @ Cognition". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-mckeaveney-59bb669a)
- Press coverage of Cognition's SWE-2 model quoted him (as Budibase CTO) on FrontierCode task depth. (https://bugtraqsolutions.com/en/news/2026-09-11-cognition-swe-2)
- Wrote 'A story about open-source, the Bulgarian Government and the war in Ukraine' on the Budibase blog, about a Bulgarian government use of Budibase. (https://budibase.com/blog/updates/a-story-about-open-source-the-bulgarian-government-and-the-war-in-ukraine/)
- Announced Budibase's 0.9 'new Budibase (Beta)' release on GitHub and answered community discussions as shogunpurple, showing hands-on maintainer work on the 28k-star repo. (https://github.com/Budibase/budibase/discussions/1557)
- Software Engineer at Rapid7 (2016-2018) after a 2014-2015 placement as a Java developer in the Rapid7 Belfast platform team. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-mckeaveney-59bb669a)
- Full stack web developer passionate about SaaS and the web platform. Open source contributor with contributions to some of the most popular JavaScript projects in the world used by thousands of developers every day.

Web development enthusiast with experience building applications with JavaScript as well as server side experience in Spring, Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, Python and more. Have spoken at meetups and conferences about open source libraries I have built and various other software developme; this comes from the profile summary and preserves the person's own positioning. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-mckeaveney-59bb669a)
- Silicon Republic coverage of Budibase's funding names him as CTO alongside CEO Mike Shanks and co-founder Joe Johnston. (https://www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/budibase-low-code-funding)
- Co-presented Budibase v3 launch week Day 4 (AI) with Joe Johnston. (https://budibase.com/blog/updates/v3/launchweek/day4/)
- Ran Shogun Digital, a product agency building MVPs for founders, as Director (Sep 2019 to Jan 2022) in parallel with Budibase's early years; his GitHub handle shogunpurple carries the same name. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-mckeaveney-59bb669a)
- Previous roles include CTO & Co-Founder at Budibase; Director at Shogun Digital; Lead Web Developer (Contract) at novastone; Data Engineer at SquareFoot; Software Engineer at Rapid7; Placement Software Engineer at Rapid7. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-mckeaveney-59bb669a)
- Before founding Budibase: contract Lead Web Developer at novastone (2019) and Data Engineer at SquareFoot (2018-2019). (https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-mckeaveney-59bb669a)
- Personal open-source repos include react-anaconda, clinews (CLI news reader, 70+ sources), theme-it (zero-dependency CSS-variable theming) and aws-cdk-scraper. (https://github.com/shogunpurple)
- Wrote for LogRocket on SSR with isomorphic JavaScript, describing himself as a builder of cloud native web and mobile apps with React, Svelte and AWS. (https://blog.logrocket.com/ssr-with-isomorphic-javascript/)
- Named in a list of Belfast's most impressive CTOs in software for his Budibase role. (https://beststartup.co.uk/belfasts-7-most-impressive-successful-ctos-in-the-software-space/)
- Location is Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-mckeaveney-59bb669a)
- Based in Lisbon, Portugal (LinkedIn, X and GitHub agree), having previously been Belfast-based per his Medium bio. (https://x.com/martinmck_)

## Experience
- Founder at Soria Labs - Dublin, Ireland (Jan 2026 - Present)
- Engineering at Cognition - San Francisco, United States (Jun 2025 - Present)
- CTO & Co-Founder at Autonurture AI - Lisbon, Portugal (Jan 2025 - Present)
- CTO & Co-Founder at Budibase - Belfast Metropolitan Area (Jan 2020 - Sep 2025)
- Director at Shogun Digital - Belfast, United Kingdom (Sep 2019 - Jan 2022): Shogun Digital is a digital products agency that specialises in turning ideas and concepts from entrepreneurs into fully functional, demoable prototypes and MVPs and iterating on them over time to become fully fledged, high quality software products. We work hard to understand your business and work very closely with founders through every step of the process.
- Lead Web Developer (Contract) at novastone - Belfast, United Kingdom (Sep 2019 - Dec 2019)
- Data Engineer at SquareFoot - Belfast, United Kingdom (Apr 2018 - Sep 2019)
- Software Engineer at Rapid7 - Belfast, United Kingdom (Jun 2016 - Apr 2018): Rapid7 is a leading provider of security data and analytics solutions that enable organizations to implement an active, analytics-driven approach to cyber security. We combine our extensive experience in security data and analytics and deep insight into attacker behaviors and techniques to make sense of the wealth of data available to organizations about their IT environments and users. Our solutions empower organizations to prevent attacks by providing visibility into vulnerabilities and to rapidly detect compromises, respond to breaches, and correct the underlying causes of attacks.
- Placement Software Engineer at Rapid7 - Belfast, United Kingdom (Jun 2014 - Sep 2015): Working as a Java developer in the Rapid7 Belfast platform team.

## Education
- University of Ulster - Engineer's Degree, Computer Software Engineering - (Jan 2012 - Jan 2016): External Qualifications/Awards gained here:
- Certified Microsoft Technology Associate (Security Fundamentals),
- Microsoft Certified Professional
- South Eastern Regional College - Edexcel BTEC Level 3 Extended in IT and Computing, Computer Software Engineering - (Jan 2010 - Jan 2012)

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-mckeaveney-59bb669a
- https://github.com/shogunpurple
- https://cognition.com/blog/frontier-code-2.0
- https://tracxn.com/d/companies/budibase/__GEMAITEAVwTg3Sg4swz2UL0psX2xOPfjzHvVT5AZQJA
- https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-6-preview
- https://cognition.com/blog/frontier-code
- https://budibase.com/blog/updates/v3/launchweek/day4/
- https://blog.logrocket.com/ssr-with-isomorphic-javascript/
- https://budibase.com/blog/updates/a-story-about-open-source-the-bulgarian-government-and-the-war-in-ukraine/
- https://x.com/martinmck_
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/martin-mckeaveney-59bb669a_ive-been-programming-since-a-young-age-activity-7494996610725171200-2157
- https://bugtraqsolutions.com/en/news/2026-09-11-cognition-swe-2
- https://beststartup.co.uk/belfasts-7-most-impressive-successful-ctos-in-the-software-space/
- https://www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/budibase-low-code-funding
- https://github.com/Budibase/budibase/discussions/1557
- https://stealthmodefounders.com/p/9-7-26-top-founders-of-the-week
- https://cognition.com/blog/windsurf
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/martin-mckeaveney-59bb669a_anthropic-released-claude-fable-5-this-week-activity-7471094279923429376-uk_r
- https://x.com/cognition/status/2064061031912288715?lang=en
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-mckeaveney-59bb669a?miniProfileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_profile%3AACoAABUsNccBU-iTbSrY6U-5SpBRsbo4JRGCHTo
- https://medium.com/@martinmck/eric-the-eel-what-does-it-mean-to-be-successful-c864c0411476
- https://tracxn.com/d/companies/budibase
- https://x.com/cognition/status/2064061031912288715


Researched with Autumn (https://www.autumn.ai) from public sources. Updated 2026-11-04. Profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people/martin-mckeaveney · Everyone at Cognition: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people