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Thanks to low corporate taxes and government incentives, Dublin has been home to the European headquarters of many big American tech companies: Google, Meta, LinkedIn and Microsoft all have offices in the city’s Silicon Docks.
“Large 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 technology companies have been developing products and engineering functions here, and that talent is starting to spill over, driving the creation of new companies.”
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 has a capital problem,” says Luke Mackey, co-founder of employee benefits startup Kota. “There are many ways to raise a million euros, but not many ways to raise 10 million euros.”
With recent funding rounds led by local and US venture capitalists of €10 million ($11.1 million) or more, that looks set to change.
open voltage
Openvolt is creating an API that collects carbon emissions data across Europe to supply to energy transition companies. It’s no coincidence that the goal is to create an API that’s as easy to work with as Stripe’s payment system: Openvolt CTO Don O’Leary was Stripe’s head of customer engineering in EMEA. With CEO Dave Curran, he launched the company in 2023. Openvolt’s first step was to secure real-time data from 90 million smart meters across the continent, followed by gas consumption and the carbon intensity of electricity supply. The company raised €1.5 million ($1.6 million) pre-seed, led by Cavalry Ventures. Its first customer is Helios Energy, which will use Openvolt data in its audit of the customer’s energy use. openvolt.com
Spikes
Tines is an automation platform for IT and security teams to automate any manual task using a menu of seven common commands, such as “HTTP request,” which sends or receives data from another system. Tines focuses on simple tasks that teams spend more time on (user onboarding or triaging low-level security incidents, for example) 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) ) in total. With 200 employees across the US, Ireland, Australia and Canada, revenue has increased 200% since May 2024. Clients include Databricks, Mars Inc. and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. tines.com
Video marker
Marker Video is a user-generated branded content platform that sells product review videos made by everyday people to brands and retailers for a flat fee. Launched as Marker Content in 2022 with €600,000 ($670,000) from Enterprise Ireland, founder Greta Dunne transitioned from blogging to video in February 2023. “I met the head of marketing at Estée Lauder who had just moved from being influencers to ordinary people. after their data showed that the more authentic the content, the better the response,” explains the former editor. 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 euros (between $111 and $223). Brands receive unlimited usage and creators receive 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 angel investors including Brian Caulfield as well as Digital Irish’s David Byrne 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 checker for defamation and hate speech,” it notifies news editors and social media users when they approach the line. It was founded by a father and son team: Conor Brady was editor-in-chief of Irish times and Neil Brady was a journalist for the guardian. An Enterprise Ireland grant of 300,000 euros ($335,000), followed by an initial investment of 850,000 euros ($950,000), launched the company in 2019. The team trains CaliberAI and other large language models (LLMS) on data sets specifically created: a shortage of defamatory training material meant the company built its own. Its clients include Mediahuis, the daily mailMeta and numerous law firms involved in AI. “Disinformation and hate speech are eroding democracy because news editors are on their knees,” explains Neil. “Generative AI chatbots and the companies that make them will not receive the same legal protection as social media users.” caliberai.net
Edge level
“Customer service doesn’t work; no one likes fighting with a chatbot to reach a human and solve their problem,” says EdgeTier CEO and co-founder Shane Lynn. The company’s AI monitors customer conversations with call centers, listens for problems 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 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, 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 Mc Kay describes it as the web flow for enterprise applications. As a software engineer, Mc Kay realized “how few of the tools he had were available to non-software engineers and how complicated they were to use.” Noloco has a number 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 the apps to perform. Founded in summer 2021, seed funding raised $1.4 million (€1.8 million) in February 2022, led by Unpopular Ventures and Accel Angels, and the app builder launched in July 2022. Clients are SMEs, mainly construction companies, marketing agencies, accountants and lawyers. Available as a subscription model, revenue has grown 140 percent in the last 12 months. noloco.io
inspect ai
Inspeq.ai is a testing platform for product teams building AI applications. He supervises the development of applications, especially LLMs, to ensure that the result is accurate, consistent, does not hallucinate and is free of bias and negative overtones. The idea for the company came from CEO Apoorva Kumar and CTO Ramanujam MV, former product managers at Microsoft and Meta respectively. The pair discovered that the LLMs they worked with often “hallucinated,” producing grammatically correct but factually inaccurate information. After creating a proof of concept in 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 led by Sure Valley Ventures in May 2024 to grow its 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 was 20 and joined the food delivery app Bamboo, he realized, to his surprise, that typical salon transactions were more than ten times larger than typical food delivery orders. He founded Barespace to help barbershops, salons and spas automate their business management with a comprehensive 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) pre-seed round in August 2024 from investors including Brian Caulfield, president of Scale Ireland, Barry Napier, CEO of Cubic Telecom, and Rick. Kelley, former CEO of Meta Ireland. Barespace has processed more than €10 million ($11.1 million) in payments in its first 20 months since launching, growing the business by more than 300 percent. barespace.io
gazelle wind energy
Gazelle Wind Power is building floating wind turbine platforms in the deep sea. Ninety-nine percent of wind farms are anchored to the seabed at relatively shallow depths. However, more consistent and stronger winds are found over much deeper water. Antonio García, a racing yacht engineer and uncle of Gazelle founder Jon Salazar, devised a dynamic floating platform with anchor lines attached to the sea floor, accompanied by a counterweight that balances the platform in rough seas. The company has raised $11.3 million (€10.1 million) in capital to date, led by Katapult Group, and has a Series A round in the works. Salazar’s next goal is to reduce the cost to achieve the “Henry Ford moment”: an affordable, scalable platform that is easy to assemble, install and operate. gazellewindpower.com
Asta Biography
Antler Bio’s EpiHerd detection platform examines RNA in the blood of dairy cows, the tool by which genes are expressed in the environment. “Farmers think about breeding for perfect genetics,” explains co-founder Maria Jensen, “and then wonder why the animal doesn’t perform.” EpiHerd reveals environmental effects on gene expression (diseases, diet, agricultural infrastructure or stress), provides recommended actions specific to farms and animals, and monitors impact changes. Co-founded by Jensen and Nathalie Conte in November 2020, the company raised more than €1 million ($1.1 million), led by family office Nest. The first farm that paid in November 2023 increased milk production by 30 percent. Antler hopes to reach 173 farms by the end of 2024. Plans include validating EpiHerd to detect endemic diseases, such as bovine tuberculosis. Antlerbio.com
This article first appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of WIRED UK.