Patrick Donnelly

Paddy is a serial tech entrepreneur with 25 years of operating experience building, scaling and exiting B2B SaaS businesses — and a software developer at heart who picked up every other discipline of running a company along the way.

As an AI Special Operator, Paddy works alongside Level Equity’s portfolio company CEOs and engineering leaders to cut through the noise around AI and find where it genuinely changes how software gets built and how businesses get run. His specialism is AI-assisted software engineering — not bolt-on chatbots, but a structural rethink of how engineering teams ship product.

Paddy founded ES Tech Group in 2006 and ran the business for 18 years. Its flagship platform, EvolutionX, became the leading B2B eCommerce engine for procurement-driven industries — office products, electrical distribution, plumbing, MRO and builders’ merchants — processing over $650 million in customer orders annually across the UK, Ireland and North America. The business was acquired in 2022 by a large Dallas-based technology firm, where Paddy stayed on through 2024 to support the transition.

Alongside his work with Level Equity, Paddy hosts The Roundtable Rethink Podcast.

Special Operators are independent contractors and are not employees or investment professionals of Level Equity.