Two brothers, one giant telescope
Ciarán and Oisín Byrne grew up in Birr, a small town in County Offaly, a short walk from the Great Telescope at Birr Castle. For more than seventy years it was the largest telescope in the world, and through it Lord Rosse first saw that some nebulae spiral like whirlpools.
On winter nights their grandmother taught them the old Irish names for the sky. The Milky Way, she said, was Bealach na Bó Finne, the Way of the White Cow. A nebula, they learned later, is a cloud where new stars are born. That is where the app gets its name: a place where curiosity turns into knowledge.
Ciarán became a software engineer, building systems for research labs in Dublin. Oisín went into machine learning and studied how AI can help people learn. Both noticed the same thing: the best AI tools were scattered across dozens of services, each with its own account and subscription. For a student in a small town, that is a wall. NEBULA AI takes it down.
“A kid in Birr should have the same tools as a researcher in the biggest lab in the world.”
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2019The first bot
The brothers build a chatbot that helps younger students in Offaly with physics homework.
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2021A small team
Engineer friends from Galway and Dublin join, and the first prototype of the app runs.
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2023Tested in schools
Students and teachers at schools and coding clubs across the Midlands try the prototype.
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2025Open beta
Students from all over Ireland and beyond test the app and suggest new models.
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2026Launch
NEBULA AI opens to everyone, free.