The shift to remote work was good for Dublin’s tech scene: Investors who did not normally travel to Ireland were suddenly available to do deals on Zoom. “I actually think Covid helped from a fundraising perspective,” says Aidan Corbett, CEO of Ireland’s latest tech unicorn, Wayflyer. “Irish companies like FlipDish and Tines have raised from international investors since the pandemic.” The city’s strength is b2b, says Donnchadh Cullinan, head of tech startups at Enterprise Ireland, the government organization that helps grow Irish enterprises and market them abroad. He adds that the city might be home to the European headquarters of consumer platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, “But we don’t have big consumer or big social media plays.” Instead, Dublin excels in what Cullinan calls “pick and shovel” companies, like Stripe or Intercom, that enable other businesses to get stuff done. Ecommerce is a difficult business. For instance, companies need to pay for stock before anyone has even expressed an interest in buying its product. When Jack Pierse realized this was a major hurdle for new ecommerce companies trying to grow, he approached his friend Aidan Corbett, an expert on e-commerce analytics. “Jack came to me and said, maybe we should use that technology as an underwriting engine to provide finance,” Corbett recalls. Together, the duo launched Wayflyer in 2019, a fintech company that collects and analyses daily social media activity, credit reporting, and online reviews in order to predict a business’ future revenue. The company then offers short-term funding with a fixed fee, typically of around 4 percent. Growth has been explosive. The company signed $50 million in deals in its first year. In 2022, Waflyer raised $150 million in a round led by investors DST Global and QED. That funding round also established Wayfyler as Ireland’s sixth tech unicorn. wayflyer.com 2023 was a big year for Manna and its founder, serial entrepreneur Bobby Healy. Its app allows users to order groceries or hot coffee, which are delivered by drone. On delivery, the drone lowers down the goods using a rope, while LiDAR technology checks no one is standing underneath. Across Dublin, Manna’s drones have made more than 160,000 deliveries to customers. The company has also expanded its operations to Texas, made its first UK delivery at the Founders Forum tech conference, and also received investment from Coca-Cola, taking the total amount raised so far to $50 million. Healy’s mission is to use drones as the green, fast, and affordable delivery default for suburban areas and to end the use of roads for short trips. “This is going to increase commerce and it’s going to enable small businesses to compete with large businesses,” says Healy. “And it’s going to take cars off the road.” manna.aero Just as Ciarán O’Mara was finishing his PhD in the topic of computer vision, his aunt told him a tragic story about how one of her factory colleagues died from a workplace accident. That story led to the launch of Protex AI. “We link up with existing CCTV to identify danger before people get hurt,” explains CEO Dan Hobbs, who cofounded the company with O’Mara in 2021. Protex AI’s computer vision flags dangerous behavior to management, such as people incorrectly lifting heavy boxes or near-misses between fork-lift trucks, so they can understand how safer working conditions can be introduced. Protex AI’s software—already being used by supermarket Marks & Spencer and delivery company DHL—claims to reduce safety events by up to 80 percent. The company has raised $18 million to date, from investors including Notion Capital. protex.ai When Kerri Sheeran was living in London, she started signing up for subscription services such as meal kits, toilet roll, and period packs. But as she was planning a trip home to Ireland, she realized there was no easy way to pause them while she went away. After complaining to her sister Alex, the pair decided to launch TALY in 2021, as a subscription marketplace to help consumers not only manage their subscriptions, but also to discover new ones. The site currently sells 100 food subscriptions by brands including Jimmy’s Iced Coffee, and Riley, which sells period products; TALY takes a commission on each sale. The sisters plan to expand into digital subscriptions, such as those for online news and streaming services. “Most consumer industries today are fueled by these incredible aggregators,” says Kerri. “But no one’s actually doing that for subscriptions. So we’re on a mission to innovate our industry.” So far, the company has raised $750,000 from angel investors that include Irish entrepreneurs Jack Pierse, cofounder of Wayflyer, and former CarTrawler CEO Mike McGearty. talysubscriptions.com When Conor Sheridan tried to expand his free-range fried chicken restaurant across Ireland, his team struggled to find technology that could help them make sense of the unpredictable restaurant business. That’s why he founded Nory in 2021, a hospitality operating system which uses AI to analyze revenue, food orders, and payroll to offer recommendations such as what supplies they should order down to what their chefs should cook in the kitchen. “We’re empowering these businesses to be really data focused,” says Sheridan, claiming the platform can increase earnings by up to 100 percent. So far, Nory’s operating system has been deployed in almost 300 restaurants across Europe and the UAE, including Mad Egg and Viva Italia. The business has raised $9 million in total, from investors such as Cavalry VC. nory.ai For two years, Twitch streamer and OnlyFans model Amouranth used a law firm to remove 6,000 links to her copyrighted content that had been leaked on the internet. When she switched to using Ceartas for the same service, the company’s AI removed 50,000 links in just two weeks, according to the startup’s founder Dan Purcell. The piracy protection company uses an army of bots to find copyrighted content then automatically requests Google take down the links. So far, 800 clients—mostly female content creators—have used the service to remove copyrighted content or deepfake pornography from the internet. The company, launched in 2021, also plans to expand to work with book and film publishers. To date, it has raised $500,000 from angel investors. ceartas.io Quantum computing promises to transform industries such as drug discovery, but these computers are still difficult to use—these car-sized machines require challenging electronics to control them and they need to be kept in extremely cold temperatures. That’s why University College Dublin spinout, Equal1, is on a mission to develop affordable quantum computers, around twice the size of a desktop computer, that can be plugged into an ordinary power socket. So far, the company has built four and it plans to start selling them to universities in the next year before marketing them to companies. Founded in 2018 by Dirk Leipold, Mike Asker and Bogdan Staszewski, Equal1 has attracted $30 million in funding so far, including from Irish VC firm Atlantic Bridge and the European Innovation Council. equal1.com While working at different Dublin startups, Luke Mackey, Deepak Baliga, and Patrick O’Boyle each encountered fast-growing companies not equipped to provide benefits to their international teams. Because it was so legally difficult to provide pensions and life insurance to staff spread across different countries, some of the startups simply offered no benefits at all. This realization prompted the three friends to launch Kota (previously Yonder), a platform which makes it easy for companies to offer employment benefits to workers wherever they are. They describe themselves as Europe’s first fully digital benefits broker, and are able to set up and enroll staff in health insurance and retirement plans in more than 30 different countries. “We’re trying to increase access to core financial products that essentially we feel are inaccessible for a new generation of company and employee,” says Mackey, the CEO. It has raised $8.2 million in funding from investors including Swedish VC firm EQT Ventures. kota.io Multinationals operating across Europe typically have hundreds of bank accounts and have to employ a team of people employed to manage the complex process of paying suppliers. Fintech startup NoFrixion is on a mission to fix this. Its MoneyMoov technology combines businesses’ accounting platform with its current accounts—meaning these payments can be executed autonomously. NoFrixion was founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneurs Feargal Brady and Aaron Clauson. They have raised $4 million from investors including Furthr VC, and plan to expand into crypto payments. nofrixion.com Evervault Data security company, Evervault, is best known for its “privacy cages”, which encrypt a user’s data and mean companies would never have to handle personal data in plaintext—protecting them if there was a security breach. This summer, Evervault also launched its redaction feature, which enables companies to work with large language models built by third-party developers such as OpenAI without also sharing sensitive data with them. Founded in 2019 by Shane Curran, Evervault has raised $19.4 million to date, from angel investors such as Alex Stamos, former Facebook chief security officer. evervault.com This article appears in the January/February 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine. It was updated on December 21, 2023, to correct the name of a restaurant working with Nory.
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