👋 Céad míle fáilte! Social media has been a nostalgia-fueled fever dream this week celebrating 30 years of Copper Face Jacks. And since it’s Valentine’s weekend, let’s be honest: half of Ireland wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for a shift on that sticky Harcourt Street dancefloor.

After a decade in Australia, I’m still searching for a local haunt that captures that same specific blend of chaos and questionable life choices. Until then, my Sunday mornings remain tragically productive.

One of my better pics after a night in Coppers.

Today’s action-packed edition is a 3-minute read. ⏩ In a rush? Here's the quick 15 second rundown:

🇦🇺 Founder: Ken King is the man who traded a Kildare building site for Melbourne, and he’s just cracked the "Holy Grail" of the drone industry.

✈️ Abroad: Stripe’s $140B AI nervous system, 9fin’s billion-dollar answer to the fax machine, APEXX’s $10M orchestration win and CreditLogic’s Mediterranean expansion.

🏠 Home: Jack O’Meara’s $39M brain-shuttle breakthrough, Circit’s $22M growth round, ArrayPatch’s clinical push for microneedle tech and Aaron Devitt’s $1M AI play for $75B real estate portfolios.

🌶️ Hot Job: CEO @ The Earth Foundation (€75K - €100K). Remote. Inspire and empower the next generation of environmental innovators.

Enjoy ☕

LATEST UPDATES
News from abroad ✈️

(L-R) John Collison, Elon Musk & Dwarkesh Patel. Conversation included GPUs and some pints.

🇺🇸 The Hectocorn Horizon: The Collisons are doing it again. Stripe is no longer just a payments company; it really is becoming the economic nervous system for the AI age. Reports indicate the firm is arranging a tender offer that values the company at a staggering $140 billion, a massive 31% jump since last year. This momentum is fueled by a "double bet" on two transformative tailwinds: AI and stablecoins. If that wasn’t enough, last week John Collison had pint of Guinness with Elon Musk and chatted about the future of AI in space. Jez lads, take a week off, will ya!

🇬🇧 Billion dollar fax machines: While the Silicon Valley giants chase hectocorn status, London’s Irish fintech scene is getting a massive AI-powered glow-up. 9fin, co-founded by Belfast man Steven Hunter, is digitizing the world’s $140 trillion debt market, is reportedly in talks for a $150 million raise. It’s a classic "revenge of the nerds" story: Hunter and his co-founder Huss El-Sheikh grew tired of executing billion-dollar deals via fax machines (yes, really) and PDFs. By using AI to "read" complex credit documents at scale, they’ve captured 80% of the world’s top credit desks.

🇬🇧 One API to rule them all: Peter Keenan’s APEXX Global is proving that in the payments world, orchestration is king. They’ve just bagged $10 million from Finch Capital after a massive 2025 that saw them snag travel giants like Jet2, Iglu.com, and Norse Atlantic. But APEXX isn't just another gateway; it’s a "marketplace" for payments. By connecting enterprise merchants to over 300 processors and 120 alternative payment methods (APMs) through a single integration, they’ve managed to slash processing costs for big brands by an average of 15%.

🇪🇸 Mediterranean Expansion: Dublin-based CreditLogic is trading the Liffey for the Mediterranean with a new office in Madrid, marking a massive push into Southern Europe. The secret sauce? Their new platform, Cognita. It’s not just a dashboard; it’s an "agentic decision intelligence" system that helps banks move away from manual "mortgage mess" and toward instant approvals. Founded by former banking execs Eddie Dillon and Gavin Bennett, CreditLogic has gone from a "burning ambition" to fixing the €2 trillion European mortgage market.

At home 🏠

  • Neuroscience Breakthrough: Biotech Aerska led by Jack O’Meara raised $39 million in a Series A round to advance its "brain shuttle" technology to treat neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s.

  • Fintech Funding: Audit verification platform Circit has secured $22 million in growth equity while Cork-based ArrayPatch raised €1.6 million to progress clinical development of its microneedle patch for treating nail fungus.

  • PropTech Play: MARC, founded by 22-year-old Aaron Devitt, raised a $1 million pre-seed round. The platform uses AI to turn fragmented real estate contracts into operational data for $75 billion plus portfolios.

  • Nocomed has secured €650k to develop a platform that helps healthcare and life sciences organizations track, report, and reduce supply chain emissions.

🧐 FOUNDER FOCUS
Ken King – Founder of Freespace Operations

  • The Move: “In 2009, I landed in Melbourne as a 'GFC refugee' from Kildare. I spent years in construction working like a mule, but I’d been writing letters to NASA since I was nine. I was a building services engineer by day, but I was looking at the sky.”

  • The Pivot: “I spent a year studying drones on YouTube and in obscure chat rooms. There were no manuals back then. I built my first one in 2014; by 2018, I walked away from the building site for good to build flying robots.”

  • The "Holy Grail": “Everyone tries to build bigger drones, but they get exponentially harder to fly. We took the 'Transformers' approach. We make smaller, proven drones work in unison to lift heavy payloads. It’s called cooperative lift, and it’s the industry’s holy grail.”

  • The Model: “We’re bootstrapped and profitable. No investors, no hype. I put $100k of my own savings in and worked 80-hour weeks. We’ve now done $9M in contracts because when you build something that can lift 25kg like a strongman, the world finds you.”

  • The Irish Bit: “The Irish have a reputation for being approachable but resolute. We aren't afraid of a bit of conflict, and we don’t take ourselves too seriously. That paradox is actually the perfect temperament for high-stakes engineering.”

  • Advice: “Be brutally honest. Don't lead customers down the garden path with tech that doesn't exist. Pick a difficult niche, master it, and have the 'Irish stubbornness' to never quit.”

👉 FULL STORY: Ken King – Founder of Freespace Operations

💼 IRISH INSIGHTS JOB BOARD
What Irish firms are hiring?

  • CEO at The Earth Foundation. Worldwide (Remote). You are the architect of a global ecosystem for environmental solutions.

  • Artificial Intelligence Intern at Ding. Dublin (On-Site). Join the global leader in cross-border value transfer to help people stay connected.

  • Director of Fraud Strategy at Imprint. Buffalo-Niagara Falls Area (On-Site). Drive rule creation, manage fraud performance, and use data insights to protect a venture-backed platform.

  • Project Manager at Expert360. Melbourne (On-Site). Lead end-to-end delivery of complex projects for a platform connecting elite professionals with companies.

  • Engineering Team Lead (Inventory) at Nory. London (On-Site). Develop AI systems for financial accuracy and automated ordering in hospitality.

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

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