Thanks to low corporate tax and government incentives, Dublin has hosted the European headquarters of many gigantic US technology companies – Google, Meta, LinkedIn and Microsoft all have offices in the city’s Silicon Docks.
“Large American companies have operated independently of the startup world for many years,” explains Will Prendergast, partner at Frontline Ventures. “But over the last five years, U.S. tech companies have been building product and engineering functions here, and the talent is starting to spread, fueling the creation of startups.”
Government support through Enterprise Ireland’s Pre-Seed Start Fund, designed to accelerate early-stage startups, and centers such as Dogpatch Labs are supporting this wave of novel talent. “Ireland does have an equity problem,” says Luke Mackey, co-founder of employee benefits startup Kota. “There are many ways to raise a million euros, but there are few ways to raise 10 million euros.”
With recent funding rounds led by U.S. and local venture capital funds of €10 million ($11.1 million) or more, that looks set to change.
Open tension
Openvolt is building an API that collects greenhouse gas emissions data across Europe and makes it available to companies involved in the energy transition. It’s no coincidence that the goal is to create an API that’s as simple to exploit as Stripe’s payment system – Don O’Leary, Openvolt’s chief technology officer, was Stripe’s director of customer engineering for EMEA. He co-founded the company with CEO Dave Curran in 2023. Openvolt’s first step was to secure real-time data from 90 million sharp meters across the continent, along with gas consumption and the carbon intensity of the electricity supply. The company raised 1.5 million euros ($1.6 million) in pre-seed funding led by Cavalry Ventures. Its first customer is Helios Energy, which will exploit Openvolt data in its audit of customer energy consumption. openvolt.com
In order to
Tines is an automation platform for IT and security teams that allows you to automate any manual tasks with a menu of seven common commands, such as “HTTP request,” which sends or receives data from another system. Tines focuses on the straightforward tasks that teams spend the most time on – like onboarding users or triaging low-level security incidents – to reduce “alert fatigue.” Launched in December 2019 with a $11 million (€10.2 million) Series A round led by Accel, Index Ventures and Blossom Capital, the company has raised a total of $146.2 million (€130.6 million). With 200 employees in the U.S., Ireland, Australia and Canada, revenue has grown 200 percent since May 2024. Customers include Databricks, Mars Inc. and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. tines.com
Highlight video
Marker Video is a user-generated content platform where you can sell product review videos from 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 blog posts to videos in February 2023. “I met the head of marketing at Estée Lauder who had just transitioned from influencers in ordinary people after their data showed that the more true the content, the better the response,” explains the former copywriter. Customers can scan the QR code at hotels or on products and submit video reviews that are tagged and indexed. Movies cost between 100 and 200 euros ($111 and $223). Brands can use without restrictions, and creators receive 50% of the fee. After a stealth launch in April and deals with Unilever and Acer Hotels, 5,000 creators were joining the site per month. The second round raised €200,000 ($223,000) from Enterprise Ireland and angel investors such as Brian Caulfield, as well as Digital Irish’s David Byrne, to fund the full launch in the fall. markervideo.com
CaliberAI
CaliberAI is an AI-powered content moderation platform that finds harmful and defamatory content. Acting as a “spell check for defamation and hate speech”, it notifies news publishers and social media users when they are getting close to the border. It was founded by a father and son team, with Conor Brady as editor-in-chief “Irish Times”. and Neil Brady was a journalist Guardian. Enterprise Ireland grant of PLN 300,000. euro ($335,000), then 850,000. euro ($950,000) allowed the company to launch operations in 2019. The team trains CaliberAI and other gigantic language models (LLMS) on specially created datasets – a paucity of defamatory materials on which to train meant that the company created her own. Customers include Mediahuis, the Daily mailMeta and numerous law firms dealing with artificial intelligence. “Disinformation and hate speech undermine democracy because news publishers are on their knees,” explains Neil. “Generative AI chatbots and the companies that create them will not be afforded the same legal protections as social media users.” caliberai.net
Edge level
“Customer service is broken — no one likes fighting a chatbot to reach a human and solve their problem,” says EdgeTier CEO and co-founder Shane Lynn. The company’s artificial intelligence monitors customer calls to the call center, listens to problems and offers training to humans based on the analyzed calls. Lynn, CCO Bart Lehane and CTO Ciarán Tobin launched 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 currently operates in over 20 countries in Europe and the Americas, working with Abercrombie & Fitch, Ryanair, travel agency TUI, Electric Ireland and Tipico. Edgetier.com
Noloco
Check you out
Inspeq.ai is an evaluation platform for product teams building AI applications. Monitors application development, especially LLM, to ensure output is right, consistent, non-hallucinatory, and free from bias and negative tone. The idea for the company came to 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 information that was grammatically correct but factually misleading. After developing a proof of concept in tardy 2023 through the Founders Talent Accelerator that reduced hallucination issues by 80%, they raised €1.1 million ($1.2 million) in May 2024 in a round led by Sure Valley Ventures ) 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 as a teenager. Then, when he joined the food delivery app Bamboo in his early 20s, he was surprised to realize that typical salon transactions were more than ten times larger than typical food delivery orders. He founded Barespace to assist barbershops, salons and spas automate business management with an all-in-one SaaS platform that combines appointment scheduling, customer history and marketing designed with non-technical staff in mind. 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, Scale Ireland CEO Barry Napier, CEO of Cubic Telecom and Rick Kelley, former managing director of Meta Ireland. In the first 20 months of launch, Barespace processed more than 10 million euros ($11.1 million) in payments, representing business growth of more than 300 percent. barespace.io
Wind energy Gazelle
Antler biography
Antler Bio’s EpiHerd screening platform examines RNA in the blood of dairy cows, a tool that enables gene expression in the environment. “Farmers think about breeding for perfect genetics,” explains co-founder Maria Jensen, “then they wonder why the animal isn’t giving birth.” EpiHerd reveals environmental influences on gene expression – whether disease, diet, farm infrastructure or stress – provides farm- and animal-specific recommended actions and monitors changes in influence. 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 paid farm in November 2023 increased milk production by 30%. Antler expects to have 173 farms by the end of 2024. Plans include validating EpiHerd to screen for endemic diseases such as bovine tuberculosis. antlerbio.com
This article first appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of WIRED UK.