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👋 Céad míle fáilte! You may have noticed your inbox from irish insights went quiet for a couple of weeks. There is a good reason for that.
Our co-founder Stephen married his beautiful wife Eva in the south of France. Best man duties were handled with admirable composure and minimal improvisation by yours truly, Chris.
To Stephen and Eva: huge congratulations from everyone at irish insights. May the marriage be long, the in-laws warm, and the Wi-Fi always strong enough for a sneaky newsletter edit.
Thanks for your patience while we took a breather. We are refreshed, slightly jetlagged (still), and back at the desk. The Irish tech scene took no such break, so there is a sizeable backlog of brilliant news to get through. Let's jump straight in.
Chris and Stephen in action at the wedding
TL;DR:
✈️ Abroad: Fonoa closes $110m and buys PwC's tax platform, Sony swallows StatSports, Tines banked $125m Series C off the back of doubled revenue, and Cork's Poppulo bolts on Paris-based Sociabble.
🏠 At home: Payslip and Deloitte cross €5bn in global payroll from a base in Mayo, xWave's NHS-anchored €3m raise, WaterWipes' Edward McCloskey competes for the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year crown, and Irish VC funding climbs 37% in Q1.
🗺️ Founder Directory: Five new diaspora additions from Dallas to Singapore. The map keeps filling.
💼 Jobs: Tines, Fin, Intercom, Qualio and TransferMate are all hiring abroad. The diaspora is busy.
🧠 Brain Food: OpenAI's Irish CFO Sarah Friar on the podcast, Skippio's Australian market entry, and Boston Tech Week with a16z.
Enjoy ☕
LATEST UPDATES
News from abroad ✈️
Sean O'Connor and Alan Clarke of Stat Sports
🇮🇪 Fonoa hits $110m Series C and buys PwC's tax platform: Dublin's Fonoa just made the biggest tax-tech move of the year. A $110m Series C in one hand, PwC's Indirect Tax Edge platform in the other. PwC, one of the Big Four, just handed its compliance infrastructure to an Irish scale-up. That does not happen often. In one announcement, Fonoa turns from a point solution into a full enterprise tax suite. Read more.
🇯🇵 Sony swallows StatSports: Sean O'Connor and Alan Clarke have sold a majority stake in their Newry sports-tech business to Sony, which is bundling it alongside Hawk-Eye, Beyond Sports and KinaTrax. StatSports started in 2008 and now kits out 800+ pro teams across football, rugby and GAA. Read more.
🇦🇺 Tines doubled revenue: The Dublin automation unicorn, led by Eoghan Hinchey and Thomas Kinsella, has doubled revenue year-on-year without announcing any fresh funding. Three months ago, Tines told us it was doubling its Australian headcount and opening an APAC hub. Read more.
🇫🇷 Poppulo bolts on Paris with Sociabble: A Cork software company just bought a French one. Poppulo, founded in Cork in 1996 by Andrew O'Shaughnessy (originally Newsweaver), has acquired Paris-based employee engagement platform Sociabble. The scale is genuinely impressive: roughly $130m revenue, 600 staff across Denver, Cork and Bengaluru, 4,500+ customers including 40 of the Fortune 100, and 50 million employees reached across 80 countries. The logic is consolidation, not a fundraise. Another big chapter in a hugely successful Cork story. Read more.
At home 🏠
Payslip and Deloitte cross €5bn in global payroll from Mayo: Fidelma McGuirk founded Payslip in Westport in 2016 to fix fragmented global payroll. A decade on, her platform sits behind €5 billion in payments a year, with customers reporting 96% fewer errors and pay runs 40% faster through the Deloitte partnership. Read more.
WaterWipes founder Edward McCloskey took the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Ireland 2025 crown and represented the country at the world final in Monaco last week. From a Drogheda nappy-rash origin story to 3.5 million packs a week shipping to 50+ countries. Read more.
xWave Technologies closed a €3m round to fund 30 new Dublin hires over three years, anchored on contracts with 20 NHS Trusts. CEO Mitchell O'Gorman is leading the build-out of NovaUCD.
Faye Walsh Drouillard has launched a new impact-focused VC fund out of Dublin, adding another sleeve to Ireland's specialised capital ecosystem.
Nexus Inclusion raised €1.5m to scale its accessibility platform, taking another piece of the European compliance market.
📰 Have a story that needs to be told? Drop us a note here.
🗺️ FOUNDER DIRECTORY
New additions from the diaspora
The map keeps filling out. Five new abroad-based founders joined this week, spanning telecoms in Texas, biotech in Singapore, and real estate in London.
🇺🇸 United States
Karl Kenny | Genesis Tel | Dallas
Telecoms founder bringing Irish operating discipline to the US infrastructure stack.
🇸🇬 Singapore
Damien Keogh | BluMaiden | Singapore
Microbiome-driven biotech using AI to accelerate drug discovery, built out of Singapore with strong Irish roots.
🇦🇺 Australia
Fred Molloy | Konnecting | Sydney
HR and recruitment platform helping Australian businesses tap into global talent pools.
🇪🇸 Spain
Cathal McCabe | Duchas Consultancy | Malaga
Professional training and management consulting practice serving clients across Europe.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom
James Mulcahy | Helms Capital | London
Real estate investment platform building a portfolio across UK prime markets.
🍀 The Global Irish Founder Directory | The Irish diaspora is building the future 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
Sarah Friar
Sarah Friar, OpenAI's Irish-born CFO, sits for a podcast. The Sion Mills native (previously CEO of Nextdoor, CFO at Square, Goldman before that) is one of the most senior Irish voices in global tech. Worth a listen for anyone curious about how the financial machine behind AI's biggest story actually runs. Listen here.
Irish VC funding hit $212m in Q1, up 37% year-on-year. The scale capital gap is still real, but the early-stage engine is running.
Skippio's Daniel Coen took part in a market-entry mission to Australia with Enterprise Ireland, bringing 11 Irish startups to the AFL and Melbourne Park. Read more.
Green Room hosted Boston Tech Week with a16z and the Irish Consulate, gathering 100+ Irish and European founders to surface talent inside Harvard, MIT and Northeastern. Read more.
Digital Irish convened 34 founders and 33 investors at the Embassy of Ireland in London. Half the attendees came away with actual business opportunities Read more.
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