Sean McAllister and the graveyard that changed his map

A priest needed a map. Sean McAllister had a surveying business. In 2009, that was enough to put him to work in his local parish graveyard, checking the ground and the information on the gravestones. It sounds like a modest commission. The priest had, rather accidentally, handed him a different career.

The difficulty was in joining things up. A grave had a physical location. Its information could live somewhere else entirely. McAllister and his wife, Leona, saw the distance between those two facts and began building a business around closing it. Years later, the business would be called PlotBox, and its customers would stretch well beyond the parish.

There is something pleasingly literal about this beginning. A surveyor looks at a cemetery and notices a mapping problem. But following that problem would take McAllister from Northern Ireland to California, from measuring land to running a software company, and eventually into the acquisition of an established American competitor. The route was considerably less tidy than the finished map.

The parish before the pitch

McAllister studied Construction Engineering and Management at Ulster University. His professional background involved surveying, with drones, cameras and software becoming tools for faster, more accurate work. These are useful credentials for a founder whose product depends on knowing where things actually are. In cemetery management, a location is consequential.

The parish was Greenlough, in County Derry. The original work included checking gravestone information, revealing how disconnected cemetery data could be. A map could describe the ground while records described the people, ownership and transactions associated with it. Bringing those accounts together became the central idea behind the venture.

Its early development was practical and precarious. When the construction company supplying most of Sean's surveying work went out of business, he and Leona revisited the parish project as a commercial possibility. Other requests for the service had been arriving. The little commission offered a way forward at a moment when the existing business needed one.

Leona's background in business studies, auditing and governance complemented Sean's technical experience. Their initial ambition was to map Ireland's graveyards as an additional surveying service. Over time, they changed the scale of their thinking and the nature of the business. Mapping would remain essential; software would allow the work to travel.

California was a long way from the parish

The early company passed through Northern Ireland's startup support network: a local business programme, Invest NI's Propel programme in 2012/13, and Catalyst's Springboard. There were already sales, but the founders were still working out product and market fit. Their path involved learning how to turn a useful service into a repeatable business.

Then came the American decision. Advice favoured concentrating on the home market. Sean and Leona went looking in the United States anyway. On their first research trip, they met the Archdiocese of San Francisco's cemetery director, who needed new software and digital mapping. Eventually winning that contract gave the young business a reference it could take to other customers.

California also supplied an accelerator. PlotBox joined Batch 11 at 500 Startups in Mountain View. Its introduction described cemetery software for land, billing and personnel, with drones supplying digital maps. The same introduction offered a less conventional founder credential: Sean felt a kinship with other people who had beards. Even cemetery software is entitled to an icebreaker.

The founders spent several months in the United States, building relationships on the West Coast. Work with the Archdiocese helped develop the product alongside a customer. That matters in McAllister's story: an idea discovered through a parish commission became more substantial through another institution's day-to-day requirements. Customers were helping to draw the next version.

The small print has a large job

To understand the appeal of McAllister's approach, consider what the software must connect. A cemetery has land and inventory. It also has records, contracts, accounts and work to schedule. PlotBox combines digital mapping with those administrative functions. The promise depends on a simple relationship: information about a space should remain attached to the space itself.

A beautiful aerial photograph would be insufficient on its own. So would a well-organised list with uncertain locations. The value comes from linking the physical and administrative views, then keeping that connection useful to the people who sell, maintain and manage the site. The surveyor's concern with accuracy has acquired a whole back office.

That helps explain the founders' early concern about how to grow. In 2016, they acknowledged that being overly protective of the product could have limited its expansion. They had come to see openness as useful. Building a company meant letting the product develop through relationships beyond the two people who had started it.

Their practical preoccupations were equally revealing. Cash flow occupied their attention, alongside finding out which marketing channels produced leads. A business can have a persuasive origin story and still require someone to study its incoming payments. The romance of entrepreneurship survives a surprising amount of spreadsheet work.

Time zones enter the marriage

Working internationally changed the shape of the founders' days. In the early period, both Sean and Leona took evening shifts supporting American clients. As the business expanded, a larger team made it possible to provide support across more time zones. The customer geography had consequences at home before it became a set of office locations.

By August 2018, PlotBox had added Austin to its San Francisco and Boston bases. Its team then numbered just over 40 across four locations, including Northern Ireland. A £2 million investment package announced in 2019 supported plans to add people and product capabilities across the UK and Ireland, North America, and Australia.

The company won Northern Ireland's INVENT competition in 2014. By the time previous winners were revisited in April 2021, Sean and Leona had built a team of 55 serving customers around the world. These dated snapshots show the work between the parish project and the much larger organisation that followed.

In December 2024, the tenth-anniversary celebration brought the story back near its beginning, to Portglenone. Friends, family, staff and partners gathered, with congratulations arriving from customers overseas. Sean celebrated the people behind the business alongside its commercial progress. The geography had widened; the guest list still included those who knew the beginning.

“And we couldn't do it without all of you.”

Sean McAllister, at PlotBox's tenth-anniversary celebration

When the parish problem reaches 400 locations

In March 2025, Everstory Partners announced that its nearly 400 cemetery locations had moved to digital contracts and services during 2024. Most were also supported by aerial drone mapping. PlotBox had helped carry out the change. A problem McAllister first encountered locally was now being addressed across a large American operation.

The details explain the stakes better than the scale alone. Everstory described the difficulties created by inconsistent internal systems and limited visibility of customer information, including double-sold plots and memorial orders going astray. Bringing work orders, records and accounts together gave staff a shared set of information to work from.

For Sean, this was a substantial extension of the surveying principle. Accurate location data had to remain useful through contracts, decisions and everyday work. The result would be judged by staff using the system and families relying on them. The relevant test lay outside the software demonstration.

Buying into the next chapter

April 2025 brought investment from Serent Capital, intended to support product development, customer service and international expansion. Guinness Ventures, which first invested in 2023, partially exited while remaining a shareholder. The founders were bringing another partner into the work of growing the company.

In October 2025, PlotBox acquired HMIS, also known as MIS, from Batesville. The acquisition expanded its American presence and its work with funeral and cemetery operators. McAllister now led a business welcoming an established platform and its customers, adding the responsibilities of integration and continuity to those of product development.

During 2026, the company's announcements returned repeatedly to reducing repeated administration. Its funeral home offering connected operational work with EverAfter Connect, its digital engagement platform. AI tools, including the Eva assistant, joined the product line. The continuing argument was familiar: make information available where people need it, and reduce the work required to move it there.

On October 13, PlotBox announced plans to demonstrate those systems at the forthcoming NFDA convention in Charlotte. McAllister's invitation included conversation and coffee. After years of international growth, the next sale still involved listening to an operator explain what needed fixing.

A map with people in it

There is another flight-related detail in Sean's public record. Alongside commercial drone qualifications, he lists private pilot licences in the UK and the United States. The UK qualification dates to September 2016. Aircraft recur in his career, though his business has spent much of its time making information on the ground easier to trust.

The personal connection to the original parish also endured. Father Oliver Crilly, the priest whose mapping request helped start the venture, married Sean and Leona in 2008 and baptised their children. Sean later paid tribute to his place in their family and in the company's beginnings. The origin story belonged to their lives as well as their business.

Seen from there, PlotBox's development has a particular continuity. A priest asked for help understanding a graveyard. A surveyor and his wife took the request seriously, then kept encountering people with related problems. McAllister's map now reaches across countries. Its usefulness still depends on getting the particulars of one place right.