Thanks to low corporation tax and government incentives, Dublin has hosted the European headquarters of many large US technology companies—Google, Meta, LinkedIn and Microsoft all have offices in the city’s Silicon Docks.
“The big US companies operated independently of the startup world for many years,” explains Will Prendergast, partner at Frontline Ventures. “But in the past five years, US technology companies have been building product and engineering functions here, and that talent is starting to spill out, driving startup creation.”
Government support via Enterprise Ireland’s Pre-Seed Start Fund, designed to accelerate early stage startups, and hubs such as Dogpatch Labs are supporting this wave of new talent. “Ireland does have a capital issue,” says employee benefits startup Kota cofounder Luke Mackey. “There are lots of 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 collates carbon emissions data across Europe to supply to energy transition companies. It’s no coincidence that the aim is to make an API that’s as simple to work with as Stripe’s payment system—Don O’Leary, Openvolt’s CTO, was Stripe’s EMEA head of customer engineering. With CEO Dave Curran, he launched the company in 2023. Openvolt’s first step was securing real-time data from 90 million smart meters across the continent, with gas consumption and the carbon intensity of electricity supplies to follow. The company raised a pre-seed €1.5 million ($1.6 million) led by Cavalry Ventures. Its first client is Helios Energy, which will use Openvolt data in its audit of client’s energy use. openvolt.com
Tines
Tines is an automation platform for IT and security teams to automate any manual task using a menu of eight common commands, such as “HTTP request,” which sends or receives data from another system. Tines targets simple tasks that teams spend the most time on—onboarding users or triaging low-level security incidents for instance—to reduce “alert fatigue.” Launched with an $11 million (€10.2 million) Series A round led by Accel, Index Ventures, and Blossom Capital in December 2019, the company has raised $146.2 million (€130.6 million) overall. With 200 employees across the USA, Ireland, Australia, and Canada, revenue has grown 200 percent between November 2022 and May 2024. Customers include Databricks, Mars Inc., and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. tines.com
Marker Video
Marker Video is a user-generated branded content platform, selling product review videos by 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 Dunne switched from blog post to video in February 2023. “I met the head of marketing at Estée Lauder who had just pivoted from influencers to ordinary people after their data showed the more authentic the content, the better the response,” the former copywriter explains. Customers can scan a QR code in hotels, or on products, and upload video reviews which are tagged and indexed. The videos sell for between €100 and €200 ($111 to $223). Brands receive unlimited use and creators are given 50 percent of the fee. A stealth launch in April and deals with Unilever and Acer Hotels saw 5,000 creators a month join the site. A second round raised €200,000 ($223,000) from Enterprise Ireland and investor angels such as Brian Caulfield, as well as David Byrne of Digital Irish to fund a full launch in the fall. markervideo.com
CaliberAI
CaliberAI is an AI-powered content moderation platform that searches for harmful and defamatory content. Acting as a “spell check for libel and hate speech,” it notifies news publishers and social media users when they’re getting close to the line. It was founded by a father-and-son team—Conor Brady was editor-in-chief of The Irish Times and Neil Brady was a journalist for The Guardian. An Enterprise Ireland grant of €300,000 ($335,000), followed by €850,000 ($950,000) pre-seed launched the company in 2019. The team trains CaliberAI and other large language models on specifically created data sets—a paucity of defamatory material to train on meant the company built its own. Customers include Mediahuis, the Daily Mail, Meta, and numerous law firms involved in AI. “Misinformation and hate speech is eroding democracy because news publishers are on their knees,” explains Neil. “Generative AI chatbots and the companies that make them are not going to be afforded the same legal protections as social media users.” caliberai.net
EdgeTier
“Customer service is broken—no one likes fighting with a chatbot to get through to a human to solve their problem,” says EdgeTier CEO and cofounder Shane Lynn. The company’s AI monitors customer conversations with call centers, listens out for issues and offers training to humans 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 lead by Smedvig Capital and ACT VC. The company now operates in more than 20 countries across Europe and the Americas, working with Abercrombie & Fitch, Ryanair, the TUI travel company, Electric Ireland, and Tipico. edgetier.com
Noloco
Noloco is a platform for any business to build an app using a point-and-click interface, without the need for software or coding skills. Founder Darragh Mc Kay describes it as the Webflow for business apps. As a software engineer, Mc Kay 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 apps as well as a blank canvas where users can drag and drop the tasks they need apps to perform. Founded in summer 2021, seed funding in February 2022 raised $1.4 million (€1.8 million), led by Unpopular Ventures and Accel Angels, and the app builder was launched in July 2022. Customers are SMEs—primarily construction companies, marketing agencies, accountants and lawyers. Available as a subscription model, revenue has grown 140 percent in the past 12 months. noloco.io
Inspeq ai
Inspeq.ai is an evaluation platform for product teams creating AI applications. It monitors app development, especially LLMs, to make sure that the output is accurate, consistent, does not hallucinate and is free from biases and negative tones. The idea for the company came to CEO Apoorva Kumar and CTO Ramanujam MV, formerly product managers at Microsoft and Meta respectively. The pair found that the LLMs they worked with would often “hallucinate,” producing grammatically correct but factually inaccurate information. After building a proof of concept at the Founders Talent Accelerator in late 2023 that reduced hallucination issues by 80 percent, they raised €1.1 million ($1.2 million) in a round lead by Sure Valley Ventures in May 2024 to grow operations in Ireland, London, and India. inspeq.ai
Barespace.io
Barespace CEO and cofounder 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 realized 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 comprehensive SaaS platform that combines appointment scheduling, client 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) pre-seed round in August 2024 from investors such as Brian Caulfield, chair of Scale Ireland; Barry Napier, CEO of Cubic Telecom; and Rick Kelley, the former managing director of Meta Ireland. Barespace has processed more than €10 million ($11.1 million) in payments in its first 20 months since launch, growing the business by more than 300 percent. barespace.io
Gazelle Wind Power
Gazelle Wind Power is building floating wind turbine platforms far out in the deep sea. Ninety-nine per cent of wind farms are fixed to the sea floor in relatively shallow depths. However, more consistent and stronger winds are found above much deeper water. Antonio García—racing yacht engineer and uncle to Gazelle founder Jon Salazar—devised a dynamic floating platform with anchor lines attached to the seabed, accompanied by a counterweight that balances the platform in rough seas. The company has raised $11.3 million (€10.1 million) in equity to date, led by Katapult Group, and has a series A round looming. Salazar’s next goal is reducing the cost to reach the “Henry Ford moment”—a cheap, scalable platform that’s simple 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,” cofounder Maria Jensen explains, “then wonder why the animal isn’t delivering.” EpiHerd reveals environmental effects on gene expression—disease, diet, farm infrastructure or stress—provide recommended actions specific to farm and animals, and monitor the impact changes. Cofounded by Jensen and Nathalie Conte in November 2020, the company raised more than €1 million ($1.1 million), led by the Nest family office. The first paying farm in November 2023 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 TB. antlerbio.com
This article first appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of WIRED UK.