Dublin has long was home to Big Tech’s European outposts, attracted by low taxes and Ireland’s position as the only English-speaking country in the European Union. Historically, however, this has negatively impacted local startups: High salaries and easy positions at big tech companies made it difficult for smaller, nimble companies to compete.
That situation is finally changing: “In recent years, the culture has shifted away from Big Tech,” said Nicola McClafferty, president of the Irish Venture Capital Association and partner at Molten Ventures, an Irish venture capital firm. “We’re seeing more and more people and talent looking to get out of those companies and really thinking about joining earlier stage and high-growth startups.”
That’s partly thanks to Irish startup successes like communications platform Intercom and payment system Stripe, which have proven home-grown wins are possible. “What’s generally interesting in Ireland is that the ecosystem is expanding and hubs other than Dublin are popping up,” McClafferty says.
Bobby Healy, founder of the autonomous drone delivery service, Manna.Photo: Laurence McMahon
Manna
Founded in 2018 by series founder Bobby Healy, Manna has quickly grown into one of Ireland’s most vibrant startups. The company was born out of frustration: “I live in a suburb of Dublin,” Healy says. “It’s impossible to get delivery from local restaurants to my home reliably, and in a way that’s beneficial to the seller or driver, so I decided to build autonomous drones to make it efficient, convenient 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 (about $3.40) for delivery, and of course you don’t have to tip the drone,” Healy says. The company’s large white drones, about the size of a seagull, have completed more than 110,000 flights. 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. manna.aero
Kinzen
Kinzen co-founder Mark Little has been one of Ireland’s best-known foreign correspondents and newsreaders for nearly two decades. Little left the TV channel RTE in 2009 and 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,” Little says. It now uses a blend of machine learning for automatic speech recognition and human moderation to further review controversial content and detect misinformation and hate speech, including by providing podcast moderation services to Spotify. Funded through partnerships with content platforms such as 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, the 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 noticed. The annual award had previously been won by Patrick Collison, CEO of Irish tech unicorn Stripe – and those who win generally cause a stir in the Irish tech sector. Inferex, the company Tarr founded in 2021, automates the development of AI models, simplifying tasks that took weeks or months to complete in a few lines of code. “We want to do for AI what Stripe has done with payments,” he says. “Engineers spent way too much time on DevOps and infrastructure,” Tarr says. He leads a team of nine fully remote contributors in Ireland, Portugal, New Zealand, Spain and the US, and has raised €3.6 million ($3.5 million) from Frontline and Seedcamp. inferex.com
teeth
When co-founders Eoin Hinchy and Thomas Kinsella left DocuSign to found cybersecurity firm Tines in 2018, they wanted to make it easier and more efficient online. The result? A platform that allows people who don’t know how to write code to automate repetitive, manual tasks. Tines is used by security teams at companies like Coinbase, OpenTable and Canva. The company, which employs 129 people, was valued at $300 million in April 2021, when it raised $26 million in Series B financing, and has offices in Dublin and Boston. In total, the company has raised $41 million from companies such as Accel, CrowdStrike and Blossom Capital. tines.com
Zipp Mobility
Founded in 2019 by Charlie Gleeson, Zipp Mobility was one of the few companies approved for a 2020 trial by the UK Department of Transport. The company sets itself apart from competitors in the crowded scooter space through its sustainability credentials: it uses only electric vans and cargo bikes to replenish its fleet, reduce its carbon footprint, and operates in-house, eschewing outsourced employees. The company operates in eight cities in Poland and the UK and launched its ninth city in its home market in March 2022. Three months later, the company raised €6.1 million (about $6 million) in investments, led by Fasanara Capital, to help it expand its team. zippmobility.com
Evervault
“Evervault started with a Google search,” said Shane Curran, the founder of the Irish encryption infrastructure startup that has raised $19.4 million from angel investors, including Alex Stamos, former chief security officer at Facebook. Curran, an amateur cryptographer and software developer, built software for his local school and struggled to keep private information safe. In 2019, he founded Evervault with the mission of encrypting the web and the data that companies process on the internet with a single line of code. Currently employed by companies in the fintech and healthtech sectors, Curran and his 30-strong team hope to eventually eliminate data breaches permanently – and are working to build out product suites to cover payments and crypto functions. evervault.com
Greg Tarr, founder of Inferex.Photo: Laurence McMahon
&Open
Global gift platform &Open solves the tricky problem of sending business gifts. It’s a challenge that co-founder and CEO Jonathan Legge identified with his previous firm, Makers & Brothers, when trying to fulfill corporate gift requests: 30 percent of the homeware platform’s revenue came from corporate customers who knew who they were items to. wanted to steer, but not necessarily where they were. From finding the right gift to getting the recipient’s address, &Open solves that problem. Launched in 2017, &Open now operates in more than 120 countries and includes clients such as Airbnb. Legge, his wife Ciara and brother Mark oversee a team of more than 90 in Ireland, the UK and the US, and landed a $7.2 million funding round in May 2022. andopen.co
Inattentive
Keeping personal data safe is a challenge, but it’s a challenge Robert Pisarczyk learned 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 extra protection but has high barriers. Oblivious automates the application process for that secure hosting. The 10-member company has lured former senior security architects from antivirus giant McAfee and raised $1 million in pre-seed funding to grow further. forgetful.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 is transforming regular videos captured on smartphones into “volumetric holograms” — which it calls volograms — using AI-powered algorithms. Shooting video and turning it into a vologram isn’t much more than capturing footage in Volu, the company’s smartphone app. The goal is to fuel the inbound augmented and virtual reality revolutions brought about by the advent of the metaverse. The startup has raised €2.4 million (about $2.36 million) in funding from Atlantic Bridge, Sure Valley Ventures and Enterprise Ireland. volograms.com
ApisProtect
Bee tech startup ApisProtect has raised €3 million (about $2.95 million) so far. CEO Fiona Edwards Murphy founded it in 2018 with co-founder Pádraig Whelan, a former lecturer at University College Cork and an expert beekeeper, after studying the application of internet of things (IoT) technology to beekeeping. “I realized that this is a huge market with a unique opportunity for applications of sensor and big data technologies,” she says. ApisProtect remotely extracts real-time data from hives, similar to the Internet of Things in people’s homes. That data, including temperature, humidity and noise in the hive, is analyzed to provide insights that help beekeepers protect their hives. apisprotect.com
