💡The Irish AI 50, 2026: the top 20 (20 to 11)

👋 Céad míle fáilte! The Irish AI 50, 2026 reaches the top 20, and from here on every name is a heavy hitter. ICYMI (surely not 👀) here is the countdown so far:

📌 Numbers 50 to 41: the countdown begins
📌 Numbers 40 to 31: the list comes home
📌 Numbers 30 to 21: halfway up

Last week: two founders who met at the BT Young Scientist aged twelve, a CEO who sold his company for $180m thirteen months into the job, and the physicist running Spotify's causal AI lab from Dublin.

Today's ten include the pair behind a €425m legal AI exit, a TIME100 AI researcher holding the industry to account, the platform where the frontier labs find their human judgment, and Ireland's first AI Ambassador.

A reminder on method: ranks and tiers only, no marks out of ten. We weighed frontier proximity, seniority, track record, scale and the strength of the Irish story. And this list rewards building AI over buying it.

Today numbers 20 to 11. Next week we close out the top 10. 🥁

THE IRISH AI 50, 2026
Numbers 20 to 16

#20 | Ian Nolan and Alex Kelly 🇮🇪
Co-founders, Brightflag. Dublin. AI Builder at home

Their pedigree is doing AI before it was fashionable: Nolan, a legal software veteran, and Kelly, a corporate lawyer out of Matheson, teamed up in Dublin in 2014 and pointed natural language processing at legal invoices, a decade before the current wave made legal AI a category.

The achievement: Wolters Kluwer bought the company for €425m in cash, a deal announced in May 2025 and completed that June, the biggest exit yet for an NDRC-backed company and vindication for ten years of unfashionable machine learning. Both founders have since stepped away, job done.

#19 | Abeba Birhane 🇪🇹 🇮🇪
Assistant Professor of AI and founder of the AI Accountability Lab, Trinity College Dublin. Dublin. AI Researcher

Her pedigree is the uncomfortable end of AI research: auditing the enormous datasets underneath commercial models. Born in Ethiopia, she came to Ireland for postgraduate study, took an MSc and PhD at UCD, and has been Dublin-based since, now running the AI Accountability Lab she founded at Trinity.

The achievement: TIME's inaugural 100 most influential people in AI, 2023. The only person on this list whose influence comes from holding the industry to account.

#18 | Steven Hunter 🇬🇧
Co-founder and CEO, 9fin. London. AI Startup builder abroad

From just outside Belfast, he went after debt capital markets, a $145 trillion asset class, which had somehow reached 2020 still running on PDFs and phone calls. 9fin's pedigree is AI-native from the start: the platform parses and structures debt market documents that humans previously read by hand, and he put a data office in Belfast because that is where he is from.

The achievement: a $170m Series C at a $1.3bn valuation in March, led by HarbourVest and taking total funding past $250m. A unicorn with a Belfast man at the top and a Belfast data office behind it.

#17 | Aoife Cahill 🇺🇸
Data AI Manager, Bloomberg. New York. Big tech AI

Her pedigree is natural language processing done properly, for decades: a DCU PhD in computational linguistics in 2004, research in Stuttgart, a decade at ETS building the language assessment systems behind tests like TOEFL, then four years as Director of AI Research at Dataminr. In 2025 she moved to Bloomberg, where she now leads foundational Data AI work and the tolerance for a model making things up is close to zero.

The achievement: running AI research organisations through both eras, the statistical NLP years and the generative wave, and being trusted with production AI at one of the world's most accuracy-obsessed information companies.

#16 | Phelim Bradley 🇬🇧
Co-founder and CEO, Prolific. London. AI Startup builder abroad

A UCC physics graduate with an Oxford doctorate in genomic medicine, whose company became the human layer of the AI industry: frontier models are trained, evaluated and stress tested on Prolific's vetted participant network, now more than 300,000 people strong, per the company. When a lab needs real people to judge whether a model is any good, this is increasingly where they go.

The achievement: building the infrastructure the frontier labs themselves depend on. The models are artificial; the judgment that trains them comes through Prolific.

THE IRISH AI 50, 2026
Numbers 15 to 11

#15 | Patricia Scanlon 🇮🇪
Founder, SoapBox Labs. Chair of Ireland's AI Advisory Council. Dublin. AI Builder at home

Her pedigree is deep speech AI: a UCD PhD in speech recognition, research at Bell Labs, then SoapBox Labs, built in Dublin to understand children's speech, a problem the big voice assistants had largely given up on. She sold the company to US education giant Curriculum Associates in 2023, and its speech engine is now being built into classroom assessment and reading products across American school districts.

The achievement: appointment as Ireland's first AI Ambassador in 2022, and now Chair of the government's AI Advisory Council, delivering its recommendations straight to ministers. The State's most senior AI voice is a founder who built and shipped the technology herself.

#14 | Will and Colm O'Brien 🇺🇸
Two of the four co-founders, Ulysses. San Francisco. AI Startup builder abroad

The O'Brien brothers' pedigree is autonomy in the hardest environment there is. Ulysses builds low cost autonomous underwater and surface vehicles, with a recovery system designed to launch, recover and recharge them with no human in the loop, where GPS does not reach and nobody can take the controls remotely.

The achievement: $46m raised across two rounds, the Series A led by a16z's American Dynamism, with the US Navy as a customer before most startups have a product.

#13 | Ronan and Conor Burke 🇺🇸
Co-founders, Inscribe AI. San Francisco. AI Startup builder abroad

Twins from Limerick, their pedigree is applied machine learning against an adversary that fights back: Inscribe layers forensic, network, semantic and perceptual detection models to catch deepfake and AI-generated document fraud for lenders, a problem that got dramatically harder the year generative AI made fake documents free. Ramp and Plaid are among the customers.

The achievement: building fraud detection AI trusted by fintech's most demanding names, through YC S18 and around $38m raised, with Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe between them.

#12 | Rosalyn Moran 🇬🇧
CEO and co-founder of Stanhope AI, Professor of Computational Neuroscience, King's College London. London. AI Researcher

Her pedigree runs through the brain rather than the data centre. Twenty years in computational neuroscience spent on active inference, the theory of how brains predict the world, much of it alongside Karl Friston, the theory's originator and a Stanhope co-founder. Stanhope turns that theory into machines that predict what happens next and correct when wrong, rather than pattern-matching over enormous datasets.

The achievement: taking active inference out of the journals and into the field, with an $8m seed in February led by Frontline Ventures, and a BAE Systems trial that put her software inside an autonomous drone swarm, featured in BAE's latest Innovators Report.

#11 | Gareth Douglas 🇮🇪
Software Director and Site Leader, NVIDIA. Ballymena. Big tech AI

Northern Ireland's quiet AI infrastructure powerhouse. His pedigree is the deep systems software the AI boom stands on, and his site has the best origin story in Irish tech infrastructure: it began as Titan IC, a Queen's spinout, acquired by Mellanox in March 2020, which NVIDIA itself absorbed weeks later.

He was there through all three names, and now leads NVIDIA's Belfast office, building the DOCA software for the BlueField data processing units that shift data around AI data centres.

The achievement: leading an NVIDIA engineering site in Belfast at the exact moment NVIDIA's infrastructure became the most valuable technology on earth. A £5.4m joint R&D project with Queen's made the office a research hub for advanced network intelligence, and his team builds on that work today. Unglamorous, and nothing at the frontier runs without it.

NEXT WEEK
The finale, and our number one

The top 10, and the reveal of the single most important Irish mind in AI. Waiting in the wings: the Tyrone woman who signs OpenAI's cheques, the textbook every machine learning engineer owns, and the biggest deal an Irish founded technology company has ever been part of.

As for number one, he is a Belfast man, and unless you follow Silicon Valley engineering leadership closely, you will not have him top of your list.

Know who should be higher? Hit reply. And if you have a name for the 2027 list, reply with it or use our story form.

Thanks for reading. Forward this to the most AI-obsessed person you know. 💡

Stephen, Chris & Eoghan

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