Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.
👋 Céad míle fáilte! We have been working on something special.
For the past few weeks, we have been quietly mapping every Irish person genuinely shaping the frontier of AI. Not the people talking about it. The people building it: the researchers on the Gemini technical reports, the Belfast man building agents inside Meta's Superintelligence Labs, the Tyrone woman holding the purse strings at OpenAI.
We’ve verified every Irish connection person by person, then scored each out of 100 on proximity to the frontier, seniority, track record, scale of impact, and strength of the Irish link. The result is the Irish AI 50, a ranked countdown of the most important Irish minds in AI across the globe.
Starting next week, we count them down ten at a time, from 50 all the way to 1. The ranking is opinionated, and we expect arguments.
P.S. Congrats to Mayo! What a win; check out a simply brilliant video in brain food that will bring a smile to your face.
TL;DR:
✈️ Abroad: A Belfast doctor's Melbourne startups are up for three awards, Cabra-born Liam Dolan's Oxford spin-out Moa banks £22.2m, Dublin's T-Pro buys into 120 NHS Trusts, and Stripe's first hire bought a US bank.
🏠 At home: OpenAI parks its EU HQ in a Dublin fruit warehouse, Tines launches 3B, Kilkenny's Entegro buys Acel Energy, tech M&A hits €33.2bn, and Cathal Gaffney bows out of Brown Bag Films.
👑 Founder Directory: Deirdre Mc Gettrick left investment banking to build ufurnish.com, the furniture search engine.
💰 Investment tracker: TensorX launched with €8m, NeuroBell raised $5.5m, Nernst Electric raised $2m, NestiFi passed $1m of its pre-seed, and Everhaze banked €450k.
🧠 Brain food: Mayo's big moment, Navro's unlikely fintech CEO, Ireland's AI correction exposure, a climate accelerator, and a 90-second website builder.
Enjoy ☕
LATEST UPDATES
News from abroad ✈️
Louis has made a seamless transition from doctor to startup founder
🇦🇺 Three awards for the doctor who taught himself to code: Belfast's Louis Sisk trained in Glasgow, worked NHS wards, then crossed the world to become a surgical registrar in Melbourne. Fed up with locum agencies, he taught himself to code and founded Medlo in 2022, a marketplace handling onboarding, credentialing and instant payment for locum doctors, now working with 600+ across Australia. Sister company Doccy, fresh off an uncapped SAFE backed by Startmate, is a finalist for Startup of the Year and The AI Gamechanger at Startup Daily's Best in Tech Awards, with co-founder Jordi Hermoso up for Best Technical Leader. Read more.
🇬🇧 Cabra roots, Oxford weeds: Moa Technology, the Oxford agritech co-founded by Dublin-born Professor Liam Dolan, closed a £22.2m Series C co-led by Oxford Science Enterprises and Supernova Invest. Moa has screened over 900,000 compounds hunting herbicides with new modes of action, and already counts Nufarm, Gowan and Corteva among its partners. Dolan, who grew up on the Navan Road, chairs the scientific advisory board. Deep science out of a university lab, and the capital keeps following it. Read more.
🇬🇧 T-Pro buys its way into the NHS: Dublin's T-Pro acquired BigHand Healthcare, the UK clinical workflow specialist, taking its AI documentation platform into 120 NHS Trusts with a combined team of around 200. No price disclosed. We covered T-Pro's India push in April 2025; the playbook is unchanged, buy the customer relationship, then grow the platform through it. Read more.
🇺🇸 Stripe's first hire just became a banker: Darragh Buckley's banking-infrastructure startup Increase has fully taken over Twin City Bank in Longview, Washington, renaming it Increase Bank. Six years after founding, Increase now owns the rails it used to rent, putting Buckley up against Lead Bank and Column in fintech's most contested layer. The community banking business, and the branch, stay. Read more.
At home 🏠
OpenAI signed an 88,000 sq ft lease on the Tropical Fruit Warehouse in Dublin's docklands as its EU HQ, adding 250 roles over two years.
Tines launched 3B, the AI-native platform it teased last week, with enterprise customers tripled year on year.
Entegro, the Kilkenny engineering group, is acquiring Monaghan solar specialist Acel Energy, forming Entegro Energy and adding around 100 jobs.
Irish tech M&A hit €33.2bn in the first half, nearly triple last year, even as deal volume fell 17%.
Cathal Gaffney is leaving Brown Bag Films after 32 years, from Oscar-nominated shorts to a global kids' TV powerhouse.
📰 Have a story that needs to be told? Drop us a note here.
🗺️ FOUNDER DIRECTORY
Deirdre Mc Gettrick - ufurnish.com
- Role: Co-Founder & CEO, ufurnish.com
- Base: London, UK
- Focus: Search and discovery platform for furniture, 1m+ products from 100+ retailers.
- Stage: Venture-backed (£2.3m raised)
Deirdre Mc Gettrick spent a decade in acquisition finance, starting on BNP Paribas' graduate programme and rising to Vice President at HSBC, executing deals across the UK, the Netherlands and Ireland. Then she tried to furnish her own home. Hundreds of retailers, no single place to search them, and a Trinity College Dublin graduate with deal-execution instincts staring at an unaggregated market.
ufurnish.com is the result: a search engine for furniture that pulls over a million products from more than 100 retailers, John Lewis and Wayfair included, into one place. Search won in flights and hotels years ago. Furniture was still waiting for it, and Deirdre got there first.
Three more Irish founders new on the map:
🇦🇺 Harry Power | AttendMe | Sydney. The UCD-trained doctor built an AI that gives clinicians evidence-ranked answers across 34 specialties, every response backed by peer-reviewed citations.
🇨🇦 Pauric Bannigan | Intrepid Labs | Toronto. Co-founder and chief scientific officer of the University of Toronto spin-out whose self-driving lab cuts drug formulation from months to days, with $11m raised.
🇩🇪 Emily Sheridan | Level Nine Labs | Berlin. The bio-nanoscientist's nanozyme catalysts turn biomass and waste into industrial chemicals instead of fossil feedstocks, backed by a €4m seed.
🍀 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
THE INVESTMENT TRACKER
Who raised this month 💰
Craig Donnelly, Shane Morton, Nicole Morton and Tim Grant from TensorX
🇮🇪 TensorX (Dublin) launched in May with an €8m seed led by Darius Cubed Ventures to build sovereign European AI inference on its own NVIDIA GPUs.
🇮🇪 NeuroBell (Cork) raised a $5.5m round led by Elkstone to take Luna, its AI newborn brain monitor, into the US.
🇮🇪 Nernst Electric (Bray) raised a $2m seed from aquaculture investor Hatch Blue for on-site oxygen generation built on 3D-printed ceramic membranes.
🇮🇪 NestiFi (Dublin) has passed $1m of its $2m pre-seed for its white-label family-wealth platform, raising partly through equity crowdfunding on Spark.
🇮🇪 Everhaze (Dublin) raised €450k from three Irish family offices as its PR assistant Lú launches in the UK.
🧠 BRAIN FOOD
5 other things we are snacking on this week
For the week that's in it, relive Mayo's big moment. Mayo 1-20 Kerry 1-17 at Croke Park, and the 75-year wait for Sam Maguire is over. I have watched this commentary at least ten times a day since Sunday. Pure joy.
Navro's Joe Redmond on not fitting the fintech CEO profile. A Central Bank-licensed payments firm run by a CEO who says he does not fit the startup mould, and why that works.
Ireland is "highly exposed" to an AI-driven US equity correction, says the Department of Finance. When the tax base leans on tech multinationals, Nvidia's share price becomes an Irish budget question.
NovaUCD and PTSB launched a climate tech accelerator, a dedicated path to capital for renewables startups without leaving the island.
A Cork startup's AI builds a complete WordPress site in 90 seconds. GetPresto is compressing web presence down to a brief and a minute and a half.
Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.
💡 irish insights quick links:
Story idea? Send us a note
Founder Directory? Join today