💡"Notions": Learnosity's one billion assessments

👋 Céad míle fáilte! There is an Irish concept called "notions." No clean translation, but roughly: getting ideas above your station, announcing yourself, being seen to be pleased with your own success. In Ireland that is close to the gravest sin there is.

Which is why Gavin Cooney's post this week (check it out below) counts as a small act of rebellion. The Learnosity founder broke the no-notions rule to share one number: this year his company ran one billion assessments. 🤯

A billion, with a B, across 47.5 million learners, quietly powering more than 150 edtech products that will never carry its name. "The biggest edtech company you've never heard of," he called it, before catching himself and signing off quickly, wouldn't want to be catching notion sickness.

Learnosity is a quintesential irish insights story built by two Irish founders, Gavin Cooney and Mark Lynch, who met at a meet-up in Sydney, opened their first office in a garden shed in Australia, and grew the thing into a global assessment engine that now runs a serious operation back home in Dublin. Invisible by design, quietly enormous. Abroad, then home.

At Irish Insights we are unapologetically pro-notions. We exist to catch Irish founders doing cool things far from home and make sure they get seen for it. So consider this your weekly dose. Notions on.

Let's jump straight in. 🦘

P.s Wispr Flow, who are the ad in this newsletter has been my fav piece of tech this year. If you are constantly updating LLM’s on next steps, use this to make yourself 5x faster!

TL;DR:

✈️ Abroad: Lantern raises $7m in San Francisco, Kenny Jacobs joins Manna for its US push, and Irish buyers Druid and Viatel shop in Munich and Glasgow.

🏠 Home: WrxFlo banks €3m for Limerick operations AI, IDA logs 10,410 jobs in a record half, and Hexis lands a sports-tech seed.

👑 Founder: Lydia Foott built Qashio into a Gulf fintech from Dubai, and just brought its European HQ home to Dublin.

🧠 Brain Food: the age of the solopreneur, the week in Irish startups, and where the diaspora is really expanding.

Enjoy ☕

LATEST UPDATES
News from abroad ✈️

🇺🇸 Lantern lights up at $45m: Offaly's Conor Leen and his co-founders raised $7m in seed funding for Lantern, their San Francisco AI demand-forecasting startup, at a $45m valuation led by Pear VC and Primary Venture Partners. Built out of Stanford after more than 200 distributor interviews, Lantern now sends daily purchasing calls to HVAC, plumbing and industrial distributors across the States. A Midlands founder pricing the unglamorous middle of American supply chains, and the Valley is paying up for it. Read more

🇺🇸 Manna lands a heavyweight for its US push: Bobby Healy's Manna named Kenny Jacobs, the former DAA chief and ex-Ryanair CMO, as executive chairman to drive its expansion into the United States and UK. The plan is a 1,000-job operations and manufacturing base in Tulsa, Oklahoma, flying for DoorDash, McDonald's and Uber Eats within two months, even as Manna pauses Irish deliveries over the missing national drone framework. When you hire the man who ran Dublin Airport to scale your drone fleet, you are not just testing the water. Read more

🇩🇪 Wicklow buys in Munich: Druid Software acquired the team and IP of Node-H, a Munich Radio Access Network specialist, folding its engineers into Druid's private 4G and 5G platform. The direction of travel is the story, a Wicklow company buying German deep-tech talent, not the other way round. Read more

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Viatel's second cyber flag: The Irish-headquartered group bought Glasgow's FullProxy, its second cybersecurity acquisition inside a year, backed by Macquarie Capital. FullProxy brings NHS and Scottish Government clients into a buy-and-build that is fast becoming an Irish specialty in regulated cyber. Read more

At home 🏠

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🗺️ FOUNDER DIRECTORY
Lydia Foott, Qashio

- Role: Founder
- Base: Dubai, UAE
- Focus: B2B spend management and corporate cards
- Stage: Seed

Lydia Foott went from the University of Limerick to building Qashio in Dubai, a B2B spend-management and corporate-card platform that gives businesses real-time control over their money. Founded in 2021, it has grown into one of the Gulf's more talked-about fintechs. And in the move this newsletter exists to celebrate, Qashio opened its European headquarters in Dublin in 2026, bringing the whole thing home. Abroad first, home next. Notions fully intact.

Two more Irish founders new on the map:

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Elaine Burgess | Amiqus | Edinburgh. A former Big Four consultant who turned Amiqus into compliance infrastructure for regulated firms, identity, right to work, AML and disclosure checks, made painless for the person on the other end.

🇺🇸 James McWalter | Paces | Brooklyn. The NUI Galway founder builds the software that de-risks renewable-energy projects from day one, stitching permitting, power, land and infrastructure data into one map, already used by some of the world's largest developers.

🍀 The Global Irish Founder Directory | The Irish diaspora is building in every corner of the world. Are you on the map? Join the Directory | Explore the Map

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

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