Dublin a long time ago was home to European outposts of Big Tech, lured by low taxes and Ireland’s position as the largest English-speaking country in the European Union. Historically, however, this has had a negative impact on local startups: big salaries and comfortable positions at big tech companies have made it difficult for smaller, more nimble companies to compete.
This is finally changing: “Over the last few years the culture has moved away from Big Tech,” says Nicola McClafferty, chair of the Irish Venture Capital Association and partner at Molten Ventures, a private equity firm -risk operating in Ireland. “We’re seeing more and more people and talent wanting to get out of these companies and really considering joining early-stage, high-growth startups.”
This is partly due to the successes of Irish startups like communications platform Intercom and payment system Stripe, which have proven that local gains are possible. “What’s interesting in Ireland in general is that the ecosystem is expanding and hubs are popping up outside of Dublin,” McClafferty says.
Bobby Healy, founder of the autonomous drone delivery service, Manna.Photography: Laurence McMahon
Manna
Founded in 2018 by serial founder Bobby Healy, Manna has quickly become one of Ireland’s hottest startups. The business was born out of frustration: “I live in a suburb of Dublin,” says Healy. “It’s impossible to get delivery from local restaurants to my house in a reliable and economical way for the seller or the driver, so I decided to build autonomous drones to make this efficient, easy and affordable.” Local businesses and brands using Manna can reach customers within a 30 square mile radius at a fraction of the cost of car or van delivery. The average delivery time is currently two minutes and 40 seconds. “We charge about 3 pounds (about $3.40) for delivery, and of course you don’t have to rock the drone,” says Healy. The company’s large white drones, roughly the size of seagulls, have flown more than 110,000 times. Manna has raised $30 million from Molten Ventures, Dynamo and ffVC, and plans to enter the US and another European market by the end of 2022. manne.aero
Kinzen
Kinzen co-founder Mark Little has been one of Ireland’s best-known foreign correspondents and newscasters for almost two decades. Little left TV channel RTE in 2009, and together with former political correspondent Áine Kerr he founded Kinzen in 2017. “Kinzen’s original mission was to help internet users improve the quality of their news feeds “, says Little. It now uses a mix of machine learning for automatic speech recognition and human moderation to dig deeper into controversial content and spot misinformation, misinformation and hate speech, including providing podcast moderation services. to Spotify. Funded through partnerships with content platforms like Spotify, public health authorities in Ireland and content moderation companies, Kinzen will soon offer support in 26 languages, with local analysts in Africa, Asia, Europe, Middle East and Latin America. kinzen.com
Inferex
When 19-year-old Greg Tarr won the BT Young Scientist of the Year award in 2021, people took notice. The annual prize was previously won by Patrick Collison, CEO of Irish tech unicorn Stripe, and those who win usually make waves in the Irish tech sector. Inferex, the Tarr company founded in 2021, automates the development of AI models, simplifying tasks that used to take weeks or months to a few lines of code. “We want to do for AI what Stripe did for payments,” he says. “Engineers spent way too much time on DevOps and infrastructure,” Tarr says. He leads a team of nine fully remote employees in Ireland, Portugal, New Zealand, Spain and the US, and has raised €3.6m ($3.5m) from Frontline and Seed camp. inferex.com
Teeth
When co-founders Eoin Hinchy and Thomas Kinsella left DocuSign to found cybersecurity company Tines in 2018, they wanted to make online security easier and more effective. The result? A platform that allows people who can’t write code to automate repetitive manual tasks. Tines is used by enterprise security teams such as Coinbase, OpenTable, and Canva. The company, which has 129 employees, was valued at $300 million in April 2021 when it raised $26 million in Series B funding, and has offices in Dublin and Boston. In total, the company has raised $41 million from Accel, CrowdStrike and Blossom Capital. tines.com
Zipp Mobility
Founded in 2019 by Charlie Gleeson, dockless scooter startup Zipp Mobility was one of the few companies to be approved for a 2020 trial by the UK Department for Transport. The company differentiates itself from competitors in the crowded scooter space with its sustainability credentials: it uses only electric vans and cargo bikes to replenish the fleet, reduce its carbon footprint, and manage operations internally, avoiding outsourced workers. Operating in eight cities across Poland and the UK, the company launched its ninth city in its home market in March 2022. Three months later, the company raised €6.1 million (approximately $6 million) in investment, led by Fasanara Capital, to help him. expand their team. zippmobility.com
Evervault
“Evervault started with a Google search,” says Shane Curran, the founder of the Irish crypto infrastructure startup that raised $19.4 million from angel investors, including former chief security officer Alex Stamos. from Facebook. Curran, an amateur cryptographer and software developer, was developing software for his local school and struggled to protect private information. In 2019, he created Evervault with a mission to encrypt the web and the data that internet businesses manage with a single line of code. Currently used by companies in the fintech and healthcare industries, Curran and his 30-person team hope to eventually eliminate data breaches for good and are working to build product suites to cover payments and encryption functions. evervault.com
Greg Tarr, founder of Inferex.Photography: Laurence McMahon
&Open
The &Open global gifting platform solves the tricky problem of sending corporate gifts. It’s a challenge co-founder and CEO Jonathan Legge identified with his former company, Makers & Brothers, when trying to meet requests for corporate gifts: 30% of revenue from the homewares platform came from corporate customers who knew who they wanted to send items to, but not necessarily where they were. From finding the gift voucher to getting the recipient’s address, &Open solves this problem. Launched in 2017, &Open is now active in over 120 countries and has clients like Airbnb. Legge, his wife Ciara and brother Mark oversee a team of over 90 people in Ireland, the UK and the US, and landed $7.2m in funding in May 2022. andopen.co
Unconscious
Keeping personal data safe is a challenge, but it’s a challenge Robert Pisarczyk learned to overcome when he was studying mathematics at Oxford University under Artur Ekert, one of the co- inventors of quantum cryptography. Founded in 2020 by Pisarczyk and Jack Fitzsimmons, Oblivious supports the secure operation of software as a service provider. Cloud providers offer “secure enclave” hosting which offers additional protection but has high barriers. Oblivious automates the secure hosting request process. The 10-person company has attracted former senior security architects from antivirus giant McAfee and raised $1 million in pre-seed funding to expand further. unconscious.ai
Volograms
The technology needed to create holograms is expensive, but Volograms, founded by Rafael Pagés, Jan Ondřej and Konstantinos Amplianitis in 2018, simplifies the process. The company turns regular videos captured on smartphones into “volumetric holograms” – which it calls volograms – using AI-powered algorithms. Taking a video and turning it into a vologram involves a little more than capturing footage in Volu, the company’s smartphone app. The goal is to fuel the augmented and virtual reality revolutions sparked by the arrival of the metaverse. The startup has attracted €2.4 million (about $2.36 million) in funding from Atlantic Bridge, Sure Valley Ventures and Enterprise Ireland. volograms.com
ApisProtect
Beekeeping tech start-up ApisProtect has raised €3 million (about $2.95 million) to date. CEO Fiona Edwards Murphy founded it in 2018 with co-founder Pádraig Whelan, a former lecturer at University College Cork and expert beekeeper, after studying the application of Internet of Things (IoT) technology to beekeeping. “I realized this was a huge market with a unique opportunity for sensor and big data technology applications,” she says. ApisProtect extracts real-time data from hives remotely, like the Internet of Things in homes. This data, which includes temperature, humidity and sound in the hive, is analyzed to provide information that helps beekeepers protect their hives. apisprotect.com
Comments are closed.