dublin is long Ireland has become the home of Big Tech’s European outpost, attracted by its low tax rates and Ireland’s status as the only English-speaking country in the European Union. But historically, this has had a negative impact on local start-ups. Big tech companies’ hefty salaries and comfortable positions have made it difficult for smaller, agile firms to compete.
That situation is finally changing. “Over the past few years, the culture has moved away from big tech,” said Ireland, who is chairman of the Venture Capital Association and a partner at his Molten Ventures, a venture capital firm operating in Ireland. says Nicola McClafferty. “We are seeing more and more people and talent wanting to come out of these companies and are seriously considering joining early-stage, high-growth startups.”
This is partly due to the success of Irish start-ups such as telecommunications platform Intercom and payments system Stripe, which have proven that domestic success is possible. “What’s interesting about Ireland in general is that the ecosystem is growing and hubs are popping up outside of Dublin,” he says McClafferty.
Bobby Healy, founder of autonomous drone delivery service Manna, said:Photo: Lawrence McMahon
mana
Founded in 2018 by serial founder Bobby Healy, Manna has quickly grown to become one of Ireland’s hottest startups. The company was born out of frustration. “I live in the suburbs of Dublin,” says Healy. “It’s impossible to get a delivery from a local restaurant to my house in a reliable way, and it’s impossible for vendors and drivers to do it in an economical way. , we decided to build an autonomous drone to make it affordable.” Local businesses and brands using Manna can cover a radius of 30 square meters at a fraction of the cost of delivering by car or van. Reach customers within miles. His current average delivery time is 2 minutes and 40 seconds. “We charge about £3 (about $3.40) for delivery, and of course you don’t have to tilt the drone,” Healy says. The company’s big white drone is about the size of a seagull, and to date he has completed more than 110,000 flights. Manna has raised his $30 million from Molten Ventures, Dynamo, and his ffVC and plans to enter the US and another European market by the end of 2022. manaero
Kinzen
Kinzen co-founder Mark Little has been one of Ireland’s best-known foreign correspondents and news anchors for nearly two decades. Little left the television channel RTE in 2009 and in 2017 he founded Kinzen with former political correspondent Einker. We are now combining machine learning for automatic speech recognition with human moderation to further scrutinize controversial content and identify misinformation, misinformation and hate speech. This includes providing podcast moderation services to Spotify. Funded in partnership with content platforms such as Spotify, public health authorities in Ireland and content moderation firms, Kinzen will soon be available in 26 languages with local analysts from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. provide support. Kinzen.com
Inferex
People took notice when 19-year-old Greg Tarr won the 2021 BT Young Scientist of the Year award. The annual award was previously won by Irish tech unicorn Patrick Collison, his CEO at Stripe, and winners typically make waves in the Irish tech sector. Founded by Tarr in 2021, his Inferex automates the development of AI models, simplifying what used to take weeks or months to just a few lines of code. “We want to do for AI what Stripe did for payments,” he says. “An engineer spent a lot of time on his DevOps and infrastructure,” he says Tarr. He leads a team of nine fully remote employees in Ireland, Portugal, New Zealand, Spain and the United States, and from Frontline and Seedcamp he has raised €3.6 million ($3.5 million). increase. inferex.com
tine
When co-founders Eoin Hinchy and Thomas Kinsella left DocuSign to found cybersecurity company Tines in 2018, they wanted to make it easier and more efficient to stay safe online. result? A platform that allows people who don’t know how to code to automate repetitive manual tasks. Tines is used by security teams at companies like Coinbase, OpenTable, and Canva. The 129-staff company is valued at $300 million when he raises $26 million in Series B funding in April 2021, and has offices in Dublin and Boston. In total, the company has raised $41 million from his Accel, CrowdStrike, Blossom Capital and others. tines.com
zip mobility
Zipp Mobility, a dockless scooter startup founded by Charlie Gleeson in 2019, is one of the few companies approved for a 2020 trial by the UK Department for Transport. The company’s sustainability track record sets it apart from its competitors in the crowded scooter industry. We use only electric vans and cargo bikes to replenish our fleet, reduce our carbon footprint, keep operations in-house and avoid outsourced workers. The company, which operates in his eight cities in Poland and the UK, will launch his ninth city in the domestic market in March 2022. Three months later, the company raised and backed his €6.1 million (about $6 million) investment led by Fasanara Capital. Expand that team. zippmobility.com
ever vault
“Evervault started with Google Search,” says Shane Curran, founder of an Irish crypto infrastructure startup that raised $19.4 million from angel investors, including former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos. says. Karan, an amateur cryptographer and software developer, was building software for a local school and was struggling to keep his personal information safe. In 2019, he founded Evervault with a mission to encrypt the web and the data companies process on the internet with a single line of code. Now used by companies in the fintech and healthtech sectors, Karan and his 30-strong team hope to eventually eliminate data breaches for good, with a view to making payments and crypto We are working on building a product suite that covers the functionality. evervault.com
Greg Tarr, founder of Inferex.Photo: Lawrence McMahon
&Open
Global Gift Platform &Open solves the difficult problem of sending corporate gifts. Co-founder and CEO Jonathan Legg recognized this as a challenge when he tried to fulfill corporate gift requests at his former company, his Makers & Brothers. His 30% of the homeware platform’s revenue came from corporate customers who knew who they wanted to send the items to. But not necessarily where they were. From finding the right gift to getting the recipient’s address, &Open takes care of the problem. Launched in 2017, &Open is now active in over 120 countries and includes clients such as Airbnb. Legge, his wife Ciara, and brother Mark oversee his 90+ man team in Ireland, the UK and the US, and in May 2022 he secured a $7.2 million funding round. andopen.co
oblivion
Keeping personal data safe is a difficult task, but Robert Pisarczyk learned to tackle it while studying mathematics at Oxford University under Artur Ekert, one of the inventors of quantum cryptography. Founded in 2020 by Pisarczyk and Jack Fitzsimmons, Oblivious is a service provider that supports the secure operation of software. Cloud providers offer “secure enclave” hosting that offers additional protection but a higher bar. Oblivious automates its secure hosting application process. The 10-strong firm has attracted a former senior security his architect from antivirus giant McAfee and raised his $1 million in pre-seed funding to grow further. oblivious.ai
bologram
The technology required to create holograms is expensive, but Volograms, founded in 2018 by Rafael Pagés, Jan Ondřej, and Konstantinos Amplianitis, simplifies the process. The company uses AI-powered algorithms to convert regular videos captured by smartphones into “volumetric holograms,” called volumetric holograms. Filming a video and turning it into a bologram is nothing more than capturing footage within the company’s smartphone app, his Volu. The goal is to power the augmented and virtual reality revolution sparked by the arrival of the Metaverse. The startup has raised his €2.4 million (about $2.36 million) funding from Atlantic Bridge, Sure Valley Ventures and Enterprise Ireland. volograms.com
Apis Protect
Bee tech startup ApisProtect has raised €3 million (about $2.95 million) so far. CEO Fiona Edwards Murphy, with co-founder Pádraig Whelan, a former lecturer and beekeeping expert at Cork University, in 2018, after researching the application of Internet of Things (IoT) technology to beekeeping. was established. “This is a huge market, and we realized there is a unique opportunity for the application of sensors and big data technology,” she says. ApisProtect remotely extracts real-time data from hives. This is analogous to the Internet of Things in people’s homes. Data such as temperature, humidity and sound inside the hive are analyzed to provide insights to help beekeepers protect their hives. apisprotect.com
