Thanks to the low corporate tax and government incentives, Dublin hosts the European headquarters of many major US tech companies – Google, Meta, LinkedIn and Microsoft all have offices in the city’s Silicon Docks.
“The big American companies operated independently of the startup world for many years,” explains Will Prendergast, partner at Frontline Ventures. “But over the past five years, American tech companies have been building product and engineering functions here, and that talent is starting to pour in, driving startup creation.”
Government support through Enterprise Ireland’s Pre-Seed Start Fund, designed to accelerate early-stage startups, and hubs like Dogpatch Labs are supporting this wave of new talent. “Ireland really has a capital problem,” says Luke Mackie, co-founder of employee benefits startup Kota. “There are many ways to raise €1 million, but not many ways to raise €10 million.”
With recent funding rounds led by both US and local VCs of €10 million ($11.1 million) or more, that looks set to change.
Openvolt
Openvolt is building an API that collects carbon emissions data across Europe to provide to energy transition companies. It’s no coincidence that the goal is to make an API as easy to work with as Stripe’s payment system – Don O’Leary, CTO of Openvolt, was Stripe’s head of customer engineering for EMEA. Along with CEO Dave Curran, he launched the company in 2023. Openvolt’s first step was to provide real-time data from 90 million smart meters across the continent, tracking gas consumption and the carbon intensity of electricity supplies. The company raised €1.5 million ($1.6 million) in pre-funding led by Cavalry Ventures. Its first customer is Helios Energy, which will use data from Openvolt in its audit of customer energy consumption. openvolt.com
Cogs
Tines is an automation platform for IT and security teams to automate any manual task using a menu of eight common commands, such as an “HTTP request” that sends or receives data from another system. Tines targets simple tasks that teams spend the most time on – such as onboarding users or testing low-level security incidents – to reduce “alert fatigue”. Launched with a $11 million (€10.2 million) Series A round led by Accel, Index Ventures and Blossom Capital in December 2019, the company has raised a total of $146.2 million (€130.6 million). With 200 employees in the US, Ireland, Australia and Canada, revenue grew 200 percent between November 2022. and May 2024 Clients include Databricks, Mars Inc. and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. tines.com
Marker video
Marker Video is a user-generated branded content platform that sells product review videos from ordinary people to brands and retailers for a flat fee. Launched as Marker Content in 2022. with €600,000 ($670.00) from Enterprise Ireland, founder Greta Dunn went from blog post to video in February 2023. “I met the head of marketing at Estée Lauder who had just transitioned from influencers to regulars after their data showed that the more authentic the content, the better the response,” explains the former copywriter. Customers can scan a QR code on hotels or products and upload video reviews that are tagged and indexed. The videos sell for between €100 and €200 ($111 to $223). Brands get unlimited usage and creators get 50 percent of the fee. A stealth launch in April and deals with Unilever and Acer Hotels have seen 5,000 creators join the site. A second round raised €200,000 ($223,000) from Enterprise Ireland and angel investors such as Brian Caulfield as well as David Byrne of Digital Irish to fund a full launch in the autumn. markervideo.com
Caliber AI
CaliberAI is an AI-based content moderation platform that looks for harmful and defamatory content. Acting as a “spell checker for defamation and hate speech,” it notifies news publishers and social media users when they toe the line. It was founded by a father and son team – Conor Brady was the editor-in-chief of The Irish Times and Neil Brady was a journalist for The Guardian. A grant from Enterprise Ireland of €300,000 (US$335,000), followed by €850,000 (US$950,000), launched the company in 2019. The team trains CaliberAI and other large language models on specially created datasets—a shortage of defamatory material to train on meant the company built its own. Clients include Mediahuis, Daily Mail, Meta and numerous AI law firms. “Misinformation and hate speech undermine democracy because news publishers are on their knees,” Neal explains. “Generative AI chatbots and the companies that make them won’t get the same legal protections as social media users.” caliberai.net
EdgeTier
“Customer service is broken – no one likes to fight with a chatbot to get through to a human to solve their problem,” says EdgeTier CEO and co-founder Shane Lynn. The company’s artificial intelligence monitors customer conversations with call centers, listens for problems and offers training to people based on the conversations it has analyzed. Lynn, CCO Bart Lehane and CTO Ciarán Tobin launched with a seed round in 2019. and have since raised €7.5 million ($8.3 million) in two rounds led by Smedvig Capital and ACT VC. The company now operates in more than 20 countries in Europe and the Americas, working with Abercrombie & Fitch, Ryanair, the travel company TUI, Electric Ireland and Tipico. edgetier.com
Noloco
Noloco is a platform for any business to create an app using a point-and-click interface, with no software or coding skills required. Founder Darragh McKay describes it as Webflow for business applications. As a software engineer, McKay realized “how few of the tools I had were available to non-software engineers and how complicated they were to use.” Noloco has a series of templates for common HR, project management, and inventory applications, as well as a blank canvas where users can drag and drop the tasks they need the applications to perform. Founded summer 2021, seed funding February 2022. raised $1.4 million (€1.8 million) led by Unpopular Ventures and Accel Angels, and the app maker launched in July 2022. The clients are SMEs — mostly construction companies, marketing agencies, accountants and lawyers. Offered as a subscription model, revenue has grown 140 percent in the past 12 months. noloco.io
Inspect ai
Inspeq.ai is an assessment platform for product teams building AI applications. He monitors the development of applications, especially LLMs, to ensure that the output is accurate, consistent, hallucinatory and free of bias and negative tones. The idea for the company came from CEO Apoorva Kumar and CTO Ramanujam MV, former product managers at Microsoft and Meta respectively. The pair found that the LLMs they worked with often “hallucinated,” producing grammatically correct but factually inaccurate information. After building a proof-of-concept at the Founders Talent Accelerator in late 2023 that reduced hallucination problems by 80 percent, they raised €1.1 million ($1.2 million) in a round from Sure Valley Ventures in May 2024 . to expand operations in Ireland, London, and India. inspeq.ai
Barespace.io
Barespace CEO and co-founder Conor Moules worked at a local hair salon when he was a teenager. Then, when he joined food delivery app Bamboo in his twenties, he learned to his surprise that typical salon transactions were more than 10 times larger than typical food delivery orders. He founded Barespace to help barbershops, salons and spa businesses automate their business management with a complete SaaS platform that combines appointment scheduling, customer history and marketing designed to be used by non-technical staff. Founded in March 2022. by Moules and COO Glenn McGoldrick, it closed a €1.5 million ($1.6 million) seed round in August 2024. from investors such as Brian Caulfield, chairman of Scale Ireland; Barry Napier, CEO of Cubic Telecom; and Rick Kelly, former managing director of Meta Ireland. Barespace has processed more than €10 million ($11.1 million) in payments in the first 20 months since launch, growing its business by over 300 percent. barespace.io
Gazelle Wind Power
Gazelle Wind Power builds floating wind turbine platforms far into the deep sea. Ninety-nine percent of wind farms are fixed to the seabed at a relatively shallow depth. However, more consistent and stronger winds are found over much deeper water. Antonio Garcia—a racing yacht engineer and uncle of Gazelle founder John Salazar—invented a dynamic floating rig with mooring lines attached to the seabed, accompanied by a counterweight that balanced the rig in rough seas. The company has raised $11.3 million (€10.1 million) in equity capital to date, led by Katapult Group, and has a Series A round looming. Salazar’s next goal is to reduce costs to reach the “Henry Ford moment”—a low-cost, scalable platform that’s easy to assemble, install and operate. gazellewindpower.com
Antler Bio
Antler Bio’s EpiHerd screening platform examines RNA in blood from dairy cows – the tool by which genes are expressed in the environment. “Farmers think about breeding for perfect genetics,” explains co-founder Maria Jensen, “then wonder why the animal doesn’t produce fruit.” EpiHerd reveals the impact of the environment on gene expression – disease, diet, farm infrastructure or stress – provides farm- and animal-specific recommended actions and monitors changes in impact. Co-founded by Jensen and Nathalie Conte in November 2020, the company has raised more than €1 million ($1.1 million), led by the Nest family office. First paying farm in November 2023. has increased milk production by 30 percent. Antler expects to reach 173 farms by the end of 2024. Plans include validating EpiHerd to screen for endemic diseases such as bovine tuberculosis. antlerbio.com
