💡€7m ARR in three months

👋 Céad míle fáilte! Three months. That's how long it took Deliverance.ai to go from incorporation to €7m in annual recurring revenue, 30 employees, and six enterprise customers.

Dublin-based founder Mick McNeil built an AI operating system that helps regulated enterprises deploy AI inside their own walls, with full governance from day one. HPE and NVIDIA are already on board. Not bad for a company nobody had heard of until last week.

TL;DR:

✈️ Abroad: Intercom's Fin goes native on HubSpot and Freshworks, Wordsmith AI banks $70m and plans Irish jobs, Midnight Labs lands Sony backing, and StormHarvester shares lessons from scaling four continents.

🏠 Home: Kneat exits for €404m, Pilot Photonics bags €1m from ESA, biomethane meets whiskey in a new sustainability pilot, and KPMG finds data centres anchor €100bn for Ireland.

👑 Founder: Kieran Furlong of Realta Fusion. Wexford-born CEO who broke the fusion world record and has raised $140m to commercialise compact fusion energy.

🧠 Brain Food: Ireland's three generations mapped by CSO data, Sculpted by Aimee's €32m bootstrapped empire, IDA Ireland's Arizona chip hunt, a €1.5m skills fund for marginalised communities, and Irish distilleries facing closure as whiskey demand falls.

Enjoy ☕

LATEST UPDATES
News from abroad ✈️

🇯🇵 Midnight Labs lands Sony backing: Dublin's Midnight Labs, founded by Dan Purcell, has secured a seven-figure investment from Sony's Innovation Fund. Dubbed "The Internet's Delete Button," the company's AI enforcement tools have removed more than 2.8 billion pieces of infringing content: pirated films, leaked music, manga, and deepfakes of celebrities and executives. Operating from Dublin, Tokyo, and San Francisco, Midnight Labs scans over 75 million sources (including the dark web) and generates court-admissible evidence at scale. The Sony backing will fuel expansion into Japan and across APAC. "Generative AI has industrialised piracy," Purcell says. Sony clearly agrees. Read more

🇺🇸 Intercom's Fin goes native on HubSpot and Freshworks: Intercom has expanded its Fin AI Agent to work natively inside HubSpot (300,000 customers) and Freshworks (150,000 customers), no helpdesk migration required. The integration resolves 76% of support queries automatically, bringing AI-native support to businesses with no appetite to rip out their existing stack. Co-founder Des Traynor announced the integrations this week. Intercom has long argued that AI in support should fit into existing workflows, not replace them. With half a million businesses now in scope, the bet is paying off. Read more

🇺🇸 Wordsmith AI raises $70m, eyes Ireland: Wexford native Robbie Falkenthal co-founded Wordsmith AI in 2023 and just closed a $70m Series B led by Highland Europe and Index Ventures, bringing total funding to $100m. The New York-based legal AI platform helps over 500 in-house legal teams (clients include Revolut and Wayflyer) handle routine work without outside counsel. An Irish office is planned for this year, with Ireland in the running as EU HQ. "Ireland is where I'm from," Falkenthal said. "We see great potential here." The company plans to scale to 300 people globally by year-end. Read more

🌍 StormHarvester scales from Belfast to four continents: Brian Moloney lost his job in 2008, moved to Australia with nothing, and ended up building Ireland's fastest-growing tech company. His Belfast-based StormHarvester uses machine learning and IoT to help water utilities predict and prevent drainage failures before they happen. The company now has 120 staff across the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Finland, with partners in over 20 countries. Moloney, a Trinity College Dublin graduate and recent EY Entrepreneur of the Year nominee, shared lessons from that journey this week. From recession refugee to Deloitte Fast 50 winner: not a bad run. Read more

At home 🏠

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🗺️ FOUNDER DIRECTORY
Kieran Furlong - Realta Fusion

Kieran grew up in Wexford. He now leads one of the most credible fusion energy startups in the world.

Realta Fusion, the Madison, Wisconsin company Furlong co-founded in 2022 as a spin-out from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is pursuing what its CEO calls "the lowest capital, least complex path to commercial fusion energy." The technology, CoSMo (Compact, Scalable, Modular), is a magnetic mirror fusion system designed to generate industrial heat and power for the sectors that need clean energy most.

The milestones speak for themselves. In July 2024, Realta broke the world record for the highest steady magnetic field ever reached in a fusion plasma experiment: 17 Tesla at the WHAM project at UW-Madison. In May 2025, the company closed an oversubscribed $36 million Series A led by Future Ventures. By February 2026, it had secured a $95 million debt facility, bringing total funding to $140 million. In April 2026, it formalised a strategic partnership with Commonwealth Fusion Systems for high-temperature superconducting magnets.

Furlong, a Stanford MBA with a background spanning venture capital, agtech, and manufacturing, has built a team of 39 and is speaking at energy forums from Madison to Singapore. The world record holder in fusion plasma is a lad from Wexford.

🍀 The Global Irish Founder Directory | The Irish diaspora is building the future in every corner of the world. Are you on the map? Join the Directory | Explore the Map

🧠 BRAIN FOOD
5 other things we are snacking on this week

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