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👋 Céad míle fáilte!
The AI hype, which seems to grow exponentially every month, has both transformed and transfixed how we, as tech and startups, operate.
Throughout the course of our newsletter research, we started noticing a trend: there are some incredible Irish talent pushing the boundaries of AI development across all sectors of “AI”:
AI Startup builders abroad
AI researchers
Big tech AI
AI builders at home
Leading AI Frontier labs
So, we went looking for every Irish person genuinely shaping the cutting-edge frontier of AI, at home and across the diaspora, inside the big labs and out building their own. Then we ranked the top 50.
This is the first of five editions. Over the coming weeks, we count down to the single most important Irish mind in AI. We are calling it The Irish AI 50, 2026
How we ranked it
We weighed how close each person sits to the actual frontier of the technology, how senior and influential they are, what they have built and been recognised for, the scale of what they touch, and the strength of their Irish story. One more rule that shaped the list: it rewards building AI over buying it.
Fair warning: this is opinion; if we have missed someone who you think deserves a place, get in touch!
Today, numbers 50 to 41. 🥁
THE IRISH AI 50, 2026
Numbers 50 to 46
#50 | Caoimhe Murphy🇬🇧
Co-founder, Anam. London. AI Startup builder abroad
Two ex-Synthesia colleagues who left to build soul into AI, and named the company after the Irish word for it. Caoimhe’s pedigree is the rare kind at seed stage: Anam trains its own Cara models, rendering emotionally expressive avatars pixel by pixel in real time rather than wrapping someone else's API. The Sims inspired it, Forbes covered it, and the angels include the CEOs of ElevenLabs and Modal.
The achievement: $11m raised and roughly 2,000 customers for foundation models they built themselves, which is exactly the bar this list rewards.
#49 | Robbie Falkenthal 🇺🇸
Co-founder and COO, Wordsmith. New York. AI Startup builder abroad
An Irish lawyer turned operator: six years at KPMG Dublin, then TravelPerk, then Wordsmith, the legal AI company he co-founded in 2023 that puts AI agents inside corporate legal teams. BT, the Financial Times and Canva are on the books, and the FT liked it enough to invest as well as subscribe.
The achievement: a $70m Series B in June, taking Wordsmith to $114m raised in three years, one of the fastest funding arcs in legal AI anywhere.
#48 | Conor Igoe 🇺🇸
AI Research, Edison Scientific. San Francisco. AI Researcher
His pedigree is the full research stack: electronic engineering at UCD, then a Carnegie Mellon PhD in machine learning on neural architectures for experiment design. He is now a founding member of the AI research team at Edison Scientific, the commercial spinout of the Eric Schmidt-backed FutureHouse lab, training scientific reasoning models that generate hypotheses and weigh evidence.
The achievement: working on AI that does science rather than chat, and writing the essay on Ireland's AI research gap that put uncomfortable numbers on why so many people on this list work abroad.
#47 | John Carney 🇮🇪
Director of Applied AI, ServiceNow. Dublin. Big tech AI
Forward Deployed Engineering is the hottest job in enterprise AI right now, teams that embed directly inside customers to build production agentic systems rather than selling them a licence and a prayer. OpenAI, Anthropic and Palantir are all scaling FDE teams, and Carney leads ServiceNow's across EMEA from Dublin, building agentic AI inside banks, energy companies, telcos and airlines.
Few people are better built for it. Trinity PhD in neural networks, a 1999 paper on how much you can trust a neural network's output that deep learning researchers still cite today, two patents, and a machine learning startup (Prediction Dynamics, spun out of his own Trinity research) founded in 2000, two decades before the hype. Then Citi, then a 100+ person applied AI organisation at Amazon.
#41 | Dan Purcell 🇮🇪
Founder and CEO, Midnight Labs, formerly Ceartas. Dublin. AI Builder at home
His company exists because of the worst week of his life. Born in Dublin and raised in Donegal, he failed his school exams, taught himself to code, and worked his way into Google, Apple and Facebook in California. Then, on the morning of his first day back in Ireland, he learned intimate videos of him had been posted to a porn site, and found nothing built to help an individual get them down.
Ceartas, the Irish for justice, is his answer: an AI agentic enforcement engine the company says scans more than 75 million sources and has removed over 2.8 billion pieces of infringing content, now operating as Midnight Labs and an official safety partner of OnlyFans.
The achievement: ranked 90 on the 2025 Sifted 100 for the UK and Ireland, and a seven figure investment from the Sony Innovation Fund in June to take entertainment IP enforcement into the US and Japan.
THE IRISH AI 50, 2026
Numbers 45 to 41
#45 | Matthew Carrigan 🇮🇪
Machine Learning Engineer, Hugging Face. Dublin. Frontier lab
Transformers is the library most open-weight models in the world pass through, and Carrigan works on it from a desk in Dublin. A former biologist turned Trinity researcher turned open source infrastructure engineer, his fingerprints are on tools used by millions of developers, and he's lobbied to get the Irish language into multilingual AI benchmarks while he's at it.
#44 | Adis Banda 🇫🇷
Engineer, ElevenLabs. Paris. Frontier lab
Dublin-educated at DIT and a former Intercom engineer, his pedigree is the product-engineering route to the frontier: a founding engineer stint at the YC-backed analytics startup June, then ElevenLabs, the voice AI lab that closed a $500m Series D at an $11bn valuation in February with over $330m in revenue. On the side he built Fleur, an open source app store for MCP tools with over 500 GitHub stars.
The achievement: building and publicly shipping ElevenLabs Productions, the company's human-edited dubbing and localisation service, his first product launch at the fastest-growing voice AI company in the world.
#43 | Dan Valentine 🇺🇸
Member of Technical Staff, AI Safety, Anthropic. San Francisco. Frontier lab
A DCU applied physics graduate who took the long way to a frontier lab. He started as an engineer at Edgescan, the Dublin vulnerability management firm, then went through AI Safety Camp and the MATS research program under Ethan Perez in 2023.
Within a year he was publishing at the top of the field, and he has since added an ICLR 2025 paper on why image jailbreaks fail to transfer between vision models, best paper at its NeurIPS workshop first. His research question is the one that matters: how humans stay able to check systems smarter than themselves.
#42 | Peter Hayes 🇬🇧
Anthropic, formerly co-founder and CTO of Humanloop. London. Frontier lab
A Kildare native who took pure maths at Trinity, then a PhD at UCL's AI Centre on data-efficient deep learning, including early alternatives to RLHF. Out of that research, he co-founded Humanloop in 2020, went through Y Combinator's summer batch, raised a seed led by Index Ventures, and built the LLM evaluation platform used by Duolingo, Gusto and Vanta, years before evals became the industry's favourite word. He has been blunt about why he built it from London rather than Dublin, telling the Business Post "we lack ambition".
The achievement: Anthropic hired all three Humanloop co-founders and around a dozen of their engineers in August 2025, one of the clearest wins of the enterprise AI talent race.
#41 | Brian Moloney 🇮🇪
Founder and CEO, StormHarvester. Belfast. AI Builder at home
A Trinity-educated civil engineer who lost his job in Dublin's 2008 crash, emigrated to Queensland with so little money he slept in his car for two weeks, and came home with an idea about storms.
StormHarvester, launched in Belfast in 2017 after R&D with Queen's, trains machine learning models on years of sewer telemetry and hyperlocal rainfall to predict what every pipe and pump should be doing six hours from now, then flags the ones misbehaving, catching blockages up to eight weeks before they become pollution. The method is patented with Moloney as named inventor, and the platform now watches 270,000 sensors for roughly three quarters of UK wastewater utilities.
The achievement: named Ireland's fastest-growing technology company at the 2024 Deloitte Fast 50, with an £8.4m Series A funding expansion across Australia, New Zealand and the US.
NEXT WEEK
Numbers 40 to 31
An archaeologist who became a professor of AI, the Dublin company using machine learning to find medicine hiding in food, and a fried chicken restaurant that turned out to be the origin story of a machine learning company.
Know someone who belongs on the 2027 list? Hit reply with a name, or drop it into our story form. We are collecting from today.
Thanks for reading. Forward this to the most AI-obsessed person you know. 💡
Stephen, Chris & Eoghan
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