👋 Céad míle fáilte!
I had one of those surreal “how did we end up here?” moments this week after jumping on the Digital Irish Podcast with Dave Byrne to chat through some of the standout founders we’ve been spotlighting lately in our newsletter:
🌱 Steven Kelly, whose Oxford spin-out Wild Bioscience is using AI to tackle food insecurity.
🚁 Ken King in Melbourne, solving the drone “holy grail” with 100kg-lift Callisto aircraft.
🤝 David Walsh in LA, quietly building a global creator–brand marketplace in Limelight.
It feels brilliant to combine forces with Digital Irish - if you’re curious about what we chatted through (or want to hear me ramble from 33:32), give it a listen.
Now, on to this week’s stories from at home and abroad.
But first, here are my three picks from this week’s newsletter that you didn’t ask for:
🧮 Forget the World Cup - Ireland won the Microsoft Excel Championship! Former Deutsche Banker Diarmuid “The Lebron James of Excel” Early (Ireland) edged 3x champion and actuary Andrew “The Annihilator” Ngai (Australia).
🇦🇺 Donal Brady, Co-Founder and Head of Product at Work From Anywhere, is one of the founders we feature in the irish insights Founder Directory.
🇺🇸 Ethyca's Dublin Homecoming: Ethyca, a New York-based company founded in Ireland, is set to create 50 jobs in Dublin with a new R&D centre.
P.S. Click here for a cleaner reading experience:
LATEST UPDATES
News From Abroad ✈️
AI One, founded in New York last year by the Irish pair Conor Twomey and Fergus Keenan, has raised $ 11 million to address a simple yet serious issue. Most AI in large companies gets things wrong because it does not understand how the business works.
🇺🇸 ID-Pal has become one of Ireland’s strongest tech exports in the compliance space, and it has now bought UK-based NorthRow to add complete business verification to its platform. NorthRow’s clients, including Caxton and Equifax, now join ID-Pal’s existing customers, such as the Irish Department of Justice, U.S. Bank and Zurich.
🇬🇧 Irish tech front and centre at the London Stock Exchange. Ireland had a proud moment in London this week when Minister Robert Troy opened trading at the London Stock Exchange, the first time an Irish Minister has done so. Companies killing it in the UK included: Binarii Labs, Clear Strategy, CWSI, Daon, Fenergo, Fexco, Fund Recs, ID-Pal and Tines.
🇺🇸 Ethyca's Dublin Homecoming: Ethyca, a New York-based company founded in Ireland, is set to create 50 jobs in Dublin with a new R&D centre. Ethyca’s founder and CEO is Cillian Kieran, an Irish engineer and serial entrepreneur with about two decades of experience leading data‑intensive businesses.
🇿🇦 Integrity360 expands further in Africa with Redshift acquisition. Integrity360 is broadening its global reach by acquiring Redshift, a well-established firm in Africa. This is Integrity360’s third African deal since 2024, following earlier acquisitions of Grove Group and Nclose, and brings its South African team to more than 230 people.
Back Home 🏠
Stormharvester named fastest-growing tech company in Ireland – StormHarvester tops Deloitte’s 2025 Technology Fast 50 with 2,910% revenue growth.
Coras and Trip(dot)com partnership for real-time live event tickets – Trip(dot)com adds events to its platform through a collaboration with Dublin-based Coras.
Challenger banks Revolut, Bunq, N26 and Monzo snub Oireachtas banking committee – digital banks not attending Irish parliamentary hearing on regulation
Primecore plans to hire 100 Life Sciences consultants. Primecore plans to create 100 jobs over three years after new ownership.
Marama Labs wins European deep-tech demo day – Dublin’s Marama Labs crowned “most impressive deep-tech pioneer in Europe” at Deep Tech Demo Day:
📕 FOUNDERS DIRECTORY
Three of the Latest Global Irish Founders
We recently soft-launched the Irish Insights Global Founder Directory and have received an incredible response, with over 100 founders from around the world submitting their details for inclusion.
It’s a dynamic map of Irish founders building companies globally. The directory helps Irish founders abroad to connect, collaborate, share opportunities, and elevate the Irish tech diaspora on the international stage.
Check out the map and find a founder near you
We'll continue to add more founders who have submitted, but if you haven’t already and you want to be listed, you can sign up here: JOIN THE DIRECTORY
In the meantime, here are three of the latest founders that feature:
🇦🇺 Donal Brady is Co-Founder and Head of Product at Work From Anywhere, a platform that helps global teams design compliant “work from anywhere”. He has been recognised as a Top 100 Future of Work Leader
🇳🇿 Fintan Blake is the founder of DataSing in Wellington, which builds secure Azure‑based analytics and AI solutions to help New Zealand organisations turn data into decisions quickly.
🇬🇧 Alexander Walsh is Co‑Founder and CEO of Oraion, an agentic AI platform that unifies enterprise data into a single source of truth for instant, trusted insights and automation.
💸 INVESTMENT
Six Irish Affiliated Startups Secure Funding
🔐 Dublin UCD spin‑out Mirror Security, founded by Pankaj Thapa and Aditya Narayana, raised US$2.5m (about €2.1m) pre‑seed to scale its VectaX homomorphic encryption engine.
🔎 Galway-based Siren, an all‑in‑one investigative intelligence platform for national security and financial crime, has received a strategic investment (amount undisclosed) from Elastic to accelerate its AI‑driven investigations product.
🛫 Fleetcraft, an Irish co‑founded startup using AI to make aviation maintenance more efficient, has raised €2.75m in seed funding led by international investors.
🩺SymPhysis Medical in Galway, founded by Tim Jones and Michelle Tierney, secured a $1.25m non‑dilutive US grant to advance regulatory clearance and commercialisation of its Releaze drainage system for malignant pleural effusions in cancer patients.
🩹Galway startup ArrayPatch, which is building a smart wound‑care and diagnostics platform using microneedle technology, won the overall InterTradeIreland Seedcorn Investor Readiness Competition and a €130,000 cash prize to accelerate development.
🎓 Meso, a new edtech spin‑out from TCD’s ADAPT Centre, has secured €500k in Enterprise Ireland backing to scale its AI‑driven curriculum-planning platform that auto‑generates lesson plans and assessments for schools.
🧠 BRAIN FOOD
From Teacher-Saving AI to Kerrygold Diplomacy and Excel Glory
💬 Quote: “By combining educational research with advanced AI, our goal is to give teachers time back to focus on students rather than paperwork. This spin-out is a timely intervention for the sector.” Dr Chris Byrne, founder of new Trinity spinout Meso, on tackling teacher burnout with AI.
☘️ Tool: Tines is a Dublin-born intelligent workflow platform (Ireland's latest unicorn) that lets security and IT teams orchestrate their tools, deploy AI agents and automate repetitive workflows without code.
🎧 Pod: Our very own Stephen Mullan, makes his podcast debut on the Digital Irish pod to showcase three exciting Irish startups doing cool stuff abroad
💪 That’s Interesting: No explanation needed. Kerrygold is our greatest ever export.
😊 Good news: Irish life sciences & health tech companies raised a record €491 million in VC so far in 2025 – easily the strongest year ever and bucking the global funding slump
🔥 Viral moment: Ireland won the Microsoft Excel Championship! Former Deutsche Banker Diarmuid “The Lebron James of Excel” Early (Ireland) edged 3x champion and actuary Andrew “The Annihilator” Ngai (Australia).
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