💡Ireland’s Spookiest Export

💌 Céad míle fáilte (and a frightfully happy Halloween to you! 🎃)

Before Ireland gave the world Stripe, Intercom, and a dozen fintech unicorns, we exported something far more powerful - fear itself.

That’s right. Long before Silicon Valley, there was Samhain - the ancient Celtic festival marking the end of harvest and the start of winter. A time when the veil between the living and the dead was thinnest… and when the Irish, being a creative bunch, decided to throw a party about it.

Fast forward a few thousand years, and that eerie little ritual from the hills of Meath and Mayo has turned into a $12 billion global industry. Costumes, candy, carnivals - all thanks to a bit of Irish imagination and mischief.

So this week, as ghosts haunt doorsteps and pumpkins glow, we’re tipping our hat to Ireland’s first (and arguably most viral) global export - Halloween.

Because whether it’s startups or spirits, nobody does global impact like the Irish. 👻

⏳ Today’s edition is a 3 minute read. ⏩ In a rush? Here's the quick version:

• Ralco raises $500k in NYC after impressing at Irish Tech Week

• Saros Consulting invests €8M to open Cape Town hub and double headcount by 2027.

• FeelTect secures €1.5M to launch its medtech wearable in Swiss hospitals.

• Aiven picks Cork for its new EMEA Go-To-Market hub, creating 40 high-quality jobs.

Enjoy ☕

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LATEST UPDATES
News From Abroad ✈️

🇨🇻 From Dublin desk job to World Cup history: Shamrock Rovers captain Roberto “Pico” Lopes, once a part-time mortgage advisor, helped Cape Verde qualify for their first-ever FIFA World Cup - all thanks to a random LinkedIn message. Initially thinking it was a prank, the Dublin-born defender replied, joined the national team, and became one of their key players on football’s biggest stage.

🇿🇦 Cape Town Calling: Saros Consulting, the vendor-agnostic IT consulting powerhouse founded in 2016, is self-investing €8M to double its global footprint and create 50 new jobs. New sleek HQ at Fitzwilliam Place, first African delivery center in Cape Town, and a remote-first model serving life sciences, finance, and pharma giants. Enterprise Ireland-backed, the Dublin-based co-CEOs (Ray Armstrong & Justin van der Spuy) are proving bootstrapped Irish firms can scale.

🇺🇸 Dorm rooms to NYC boardrooms: Irish Tech Week New York October 2025 brought Ireland’s brightest founders to the Big Apple, where AI, fintech, and healthtech startups pitched to execs from Snap, Meta, and TikTok. But it wasn’t just talk - Ralco, a construction compliance startup founded by Irish expats in New York, secured $500,000 in funding during the event. Their platform, which embeds compliance checks directly into clock-in systems, is now expanding across the U.S.

Back Home 🏠

• Cork gets another vote of confidence: Global open-source data-infrastructure firm Aiven has picked Cork as its new European/Middle East/Africa Go-To-Market hub promising ~40 new “high-quality” sales roles over the next three years.

• Meta-Flux gets clinical: Dublin-based biotech startup Meta-Flux has raised €1.8 million in seed funding to help drug developers spot failures before they happen. The team’s AI-powered platform analyses early-stage trial data to predict which compounds are worth pursuing – saving pharma firms millions and months in testing. It’s another sharp example of Irish innovation sitting right at the crossroads of science and software.

• Galway med-tech startup raises €1.5m: West of Ireland-based FeelTect has secured a €1.5 million funding round to bring its wearable wound-care monitoring tech to market. Founded in Spiddal, FeelTect’s device monitors sub-bandage pressure in leg-ulcer treatment.

🧠 BRAIN FOOD
Understanding customer needs?, Hyrdofoil, AI agents & "Dublin’s code is NYC’s cash"

💬 Quote: An anonymous NYC investor quipped, "Dublin’s code is NYC’s cash", during a panel on AI scaling at Irish Tech Week New York, capturing the event's vibe of Irish tech talent fuelling US market wins.

💼 Job: Are you interested in joining an Irish fintech unicorn Wayflyer? Good news -they are hiring a Senior Product Manager - Credit Risk & Underwriting to shape fast, high-impact funding decisions for e-commerce brands. And guess what? You can find it on our new job board.

☘ Tool: Jentic is a Dublin-based AI startup building a universal integration layer that connects AI agents to APIs and external systems with secure, automated tool discovery. From just a few lines of code, it enables developers to deploy reliable, scalable agent workflows

🎧 Pod: The Irish Tech News Podcast: Dyle, Irish-MIT AI startup, is the first Agentic AI Account Manager unifying Slack, Salesforce, and Amplitude to drive expansion revenue. Founder Oisín O’Sullivan (ex-Klarna Ireland) now leads from NYC’s ERA with $500k+ raised, fresh off Google Demo Day, Irish Tech Week, and Times Square.

🤔 That’s Interesting: Born from a desire to make boats go faster, today the hydrofoil is being revived as a cleaner form of water transport by helping boats rise above the waves.

😂 Meme: One for any of our followers working in consultancy recently 👀

📊 Insights Poll

Last newsletter poll results: What’s most important to you when looking for a new role?
🌍 Global mobility - roles abroad or remote options (57.1%)
☘️ Irish connection - working for Irish-founded companies (14.3%)
💶 Compensation and benefits (14.3%)
🚀 Growth opportunities and career progression (0.0%)
🧭 Mission and culture fit (14.3%)

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