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👋 Céad míle fáilte! Back in September, we featured a Galway native named Jack Collins in our Founder Focus series. He was Founding Engineer at Develop Health, a five-person team that had just hit $7M ARR in 14 months. We said he was one to watch.
Jack has since co-founded Ventura, an AI platform building teammates for industrial distributors, and this month the company was accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch. His co-founder Swen Koller (CEO) is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree who previously built and exited a wholesale distribution SaaS. Jack also created the open-source Python LLM framework 'magentic', which has over 2,000 GitHub stars.
The market they are targeting? $8 trillion in industrial distribution, most of which still runs on 1990s ERP software. That is the kind of gap Y Combinator loves.
Jack and Swen pictured at the famous YC sign
This week in irish insights:
✈️ Abroad: Galway man accepted into YC, Kerry native builds AI risk platform in DC, Vertigenius goes live in 20 US clinics and Paladin's $70M acquisition spree lands in Ireland.
🏠 At home: Bank of Ireland plans €1.6bn tech spend, EY names 31 finalists, and Ireland registers over 7,000 new startups in Q1.
🗺️ Founder Directory: 5 new additions spanning London, Bolton and Copenhagen. The Nordics are entering the chat.
🧠 Brain food: Anthropic's most powerful AI model just dropped (and Dublin is its EU base), Ireland is now the 5th-largest foreign investor in the US, Irish AI startups pass €106M in total VC funding, and Irish fintechs raised $259M in 2025.
Enjoy ☕
LATEST UPDATES
News from abroad ✈️
(L-R) From left: Daniel Nolan, Chandra Bradley and Simone Garreau
🇺🇸 PrismLayer Emerges from Stealth: Daniel Nolan from Co. Kerry has co-founded PrismLayer, an AI-native enterprise risk management platform based in Washington DC, emerging from stealth with a $1M pre-seed led by Fenway Summer. Daniel and his co-founders were formerly risk executives at Block (Jack Dorsey's company). Their platform encodes risk frameworks into an agentic execution layer, completing assessments in days instead of months. A credible team, a timely AI angle, and DC as a base. One to watch.
🇺🇸 Vertigenius Raises €2.55M for US Rollout: Dublin medtech Vertigenius raised €2.55M led by Atlantic Bridge to scale its wearable vertigo treatment platform in the US. Founded by Dr Dara Meldrum, the company has FDA registration and is already live in 20 clinics across 11 US states with 3,000 patients treated. The addressable US vestibular care market is worth over €3 billion, and new insurance reimbursement pathways are opening up. That is the real catalyst here.
🇺🇸 Paladin's $70M Acquisition Spree Lands in Meath: US-based Paladin EnviroTech has acquired ICT, Ireland's first R2-certified IT Asset Disposition provider, as part of a $70M (€60M) global expansion. ICT processes over 2,000 tons of end-of-life electronics annually and will rebrand to Paladin, relocating to a new 52,000 sq ft Dublin facility. Dublin's status as the EU's "data centre capital" is the strategic driver.
At home 🏠
EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2026. 31 finalists across 24 companies, collectively employing ~3,000 people and generating almost €1bn in revenue.
Prove Digital Identity expands Dublin R&D hub. $5M investment, 50 new jobs. Dublin headcount up 50% in six months.
Start-up momentum holds firm in Ireland as 7,263 new businesses register in Q1 According to the latest CRIFVision-Net report.
Bank of Ireland plans €1.6bn tech spend over three years, including a new mobile app by end of June 2026.
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💡 INSIGHTS
Founder Directory: New Additions
London keeps pulling Irish founders in. But now Copenhagen has entered the chat.
5 new additions to the Irish Insights Founder Directory this week, spanning retail data, learning tech, IoT telemetry, and co-navigation across the UK and Europe.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom:
Cian Kennedy | elm | London Retail data platform giving FMCG brands the tools to turn sales, e-commerce and supply chain data into actionable growth insights.
Eoin Kelly | Motus Learning | London Emotional intelligence education platform working across Ireland and the UK to bring mental health and sustainability-focused learning into the workplace.
Ciarán Rooney | xUnlocked | London CTO of AI-enhanced learning platform powering Finance Unlocked, Sustainability Unlocked and Data Unlocked, delivering scalable professional education to global firms.
Trevor O'Grady | 360 Telemetry | Bolton IoT design house delivering end-to-end hardware, firmware and server architecture for large-scale industrial telemetry projects.
🇩🇰 Denmark:
David Earle | CoNavigator | Copenhagen Hands-on collaboration tool for interdisciplinary teams, helping organisations navigate complex problems and maximise the output of every team session.
London is still the number one destination for Irish founders in Europe. But the Nordics are quietly building a cluster of their own.
Know an Irish founder building in the UK or Europe? Tag them or send them the link below.
👉 Browse the full directory here
🧠 BRAIN FOOD
5 other things we are snacking on this week
Anthropic (the company behind Claude, and whose EU base is in Dublin) released Claude Mythos Preview this week. Their most powerful AI model yet, but they are not making it publicly available. Instead, it has been deployed to 40+ organisations including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and CrowdStrike for defensive cybersecurity work.
We talk a lot about Irish talent going to America. Less about Irish capital going the other way. Ireland is now the 5th-largest foreign investor in the US, with $6.1bn in planned investment this year alone and Irish companies employing 125,000 Americans. The diaspora story runs in both directions.
Irish AI startups have pulled in €106M+ in total VC funding, with 2025 the highest year on record. Globally, AI now accounts for two-thirds of all VC deal value. Ireland is good for seed, but the scale-up funding gap persists.
KPMG reports Irish fintechs raised $259M in 2025, up 9% YoY. Biggest deals: NomuPay ($77M), Teybridge ($58.61M), Wayflyer ($35M).
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