Funds and Funding in February
Irish companies receive investment, Frontline launches a new fund and Kerry valley gets access to the Internet
Welcome to the first edition of “The Land of Saints, Scholars, and Techies”! Thank you for taking some time out of your busy lives and I hope you will enjoy this newsletter.
👋 To introduce myself … My name is Seán. I am in my late 20s, Born and raised in Dublin and so I hope my capital bias doesn’t show up too much in this. I work within the tech industry and believe that the Irish market and ecosystem is a dynamic one for a small country. With COVID and too much time on my hands, I decided to create this newsletter to capture the biggest stories and provide some commentary and thoughts of my own. I hope you enjoy reading it. Feel free to contact me with feedback, please share with your network and please keep on going through these tough times.
So, What happened in February in Ireland across technology and start-ups in Ireland 🇮🇪? There was positive news around investments in Ireland, a new structure for a significant start-up accelerator, and an exciting new path forward in education.
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The Stories:
Irish VC grows 💶 - Dublin headquartered Frontline Ventures raised a new European seed fund. The aim of the fund is to invest in 45 companies over the next 4 years. Previous Frontline seed fund success stories include Logentries acquired by Rapid7 and Pointy’s acquisition by Google. Frontline are at the forefront of investment in Europe and are a company I constantly watch for updates. I have no doubt that some of the companies they partner with during this round will become massive successes in the coming years. Here’s hoping some more Irish unicorns could be on the way.
A new dawn for education 👩🏫👨🏫 - University of Limerick launched a new Immersive Software engineering programme spearheaded by Stephen Kinsella and in partnership with a number of leading tech companies and state bodies. With its first cohort due in 2022, I predict a massive demand for this exciting new education structure focused on company residencies, studio work and a flexible module selection. This is an opportunity for Ireland to take the lead in modern education and while I loved an exam many will thrive in this environment. The partnership with companies will provide great opportunities for students once they are treated as more than just cheap labour.
More Irish Investment 🤝 - Finch capital looks set to continue to invest in Irish start-ups as they close a new fund. The impact of this was seen already with an announcement of funding for AccountsIQ. Enterprise Ireland announced its 2020 performance declaring they invested more than €48 million across 125 companies. This was a doubling of investment by the government agency but there was some negative news as funding for early-stage companies dropped in 2020. Looking ahead, native companies will have to be part of our recovery so it is positive to see Irish companies being backed. In the next few years, I might be approaching EI with a media empire built from this newsletter.
€40m for Flipdish 🥡 - Irish start-up Flipdish which offers restaurants a white-label ordering and loyalty platform (Most of us will have ordered too much food from these in the past few months) has raised €40m in funding. This comes after they announced 200 jobs over the next couple of years at the end of 2020. Meanwhile, after the success of their COVID contact tracing app Nearform have received their first investment from Columbia Capital. While my heart does skip a beat when I see the COVID exposure notification I am delighted to see significant funding for Irish companies who have excelled during these troubling times.
Internet from space 🔭 - Starlink, Elon Musk’s and SpaceX satellite internet initiative has arrived in Ireland. It’s impressive that Elon has this time between commenting on Dogecoin and Bitcoin prices. With low speeds currently and some expected downtime, Starlink will really mostly appeal to first movers and those without access to traditional internet like those in rural Kerry where Starlink are looking to run a trial to the notorious technology phobic Black Valley.
NDRC relaunches 🏢 - Following a tender process, NDRC has relaunched driven by Dogpatch and regional hubs. The first signs of this were seen as they launched a range of entrepreneur and start-up supports. Start-ups were further encouraged as the Tánaiste indicated a government ambition to support start-ups and scaleups in the 2022 Budget during a Scale Ireland event. Ireland will always have a challenge in balancing attracting FDI and encouraging indigenous companies with a limited population - my view is that we may have sided too far to FDI and so Scale Ireland and NDRC have important roles to play in developing our own success stories to rival the best of the FDI.
Blockchain Banking buddies 💱 - As the Cryptocurrency market shot to prominence for many with a new ATH in Bitcoin, We.trade raised 5.5 million at the beginning of the month. While this could be seen as positive news it follows a troubled 2020 when the company’s future seemed in doubt. While some concerns are present around the value assigned to various cryptocurrencies the blockchain technology behind them is being more widely adopted at a quickening pace. There is little doubt as Blockchain continues to grow Ireland will want to build a reputation as a global hub.
Stripe Rising 📈 - Irish sweetheart Stripe continues to go from strength to strength with an ambitious valuation of nearly $115 billion seen in secondary markets. Despite some doubts, Stripe continues to grow through investments in companies like Fast, Check, and Safepay amongst others and partnerships as well as beefing up their executive team. The impact on Ireland? - yet to be determined but with the development of a Stripe mafia we can all hope to see more Irish start-ups emerge from the more than 300 employees in Ireland in the coming years.
New Entrants & New Jobs 🙂 - February saw positive news of new market entrants across BlueSnap, Threatlocker, Microchip, Repay, and CIM as well as big job announcements from Huawei, Takeda, and Microsoft. COVID has certainly caused massive issues for some companies but there continues to be growth in the tech sector.
Remote on a Roll 👨💻 - Following on from the government publishing a Making Remote work strategy, February saw some big announcements from companies like Salesforce and Spotify offering remote work to their employees. Salesforce joins others like Shopify, Revolut, Zyte, and others in building a remote workforce here. Whether Ireland can become a Remote working hub is yet to be seen but it is certain the world of work has shifted and some companies will never be the same again.
Thanks for taking the time to read the first edition of this newsletter. I hope you all enjoyed! Subscribe to receive a monthly newsletter with all the latest from the tech and start-up industry in Ireland.
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Cheers,
Seán