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👋 Céad míle fáilte! In February, when Bloomberg first reported Stripe had "preliminary interest" in PayPal, John Collison told reporters that "PayPal has had, obviously, a tough time over the past few years." The tone of a man appraising a fixer-upper he might put an offer on.
Five months later, there's a $53 billion cheque on the table - more details on that below. 👇
None of this is done and Paypal have already responded saying the bid undervalues the company. Deals this size have a way of dying under their own weight so let’s not get too ahead of ourselves just yet.
TL;DR:
✈️ Abroad: Stripe and Advent made a formal $53.4bn bid for PayPal, Limerick's Mulcahy brothers join Attio in an acqui-hire and Enterprise Ireland has backed more startups than any other European VC over the last decade.
🏠 At home: Tines CEO teases a July 28 launch of an automation "gardening tool." Meath medtech Velico expands from 55 to 400 staff using its plasma dehydration tech. Google unveils "The Bakery" office in Dublin. Ocuco raises €6m for its eyecare SaaS.
🗺️ Founder Directory: Dylan Fitzpatrick built Payfex Global in Dubai with his brother Cian - cross-border payments without holding their own licence.
🧠 Brain food: AI job disruption in Ireland, Paddy Cosgrave's bookshop, a social media playbook, Provizio's self-driving CEO interview, and the government's digital wallet privacy problem.
Enjoy ☕
LATEST UPDATES
News from abroad ✈️
Liam (L) and Eoghan Mulcahy (R) are joining Attio.
🇺🇸 Stripe, Advent make $53.4bn bid for PayPal: The formal offer landed earlier this month valuing PayPal at $53.4 billion. Stripe, Advent, and Block are contributing $17 billion in equity. The remaining ~$36 billion comes from committed bank financing. John Collison has been characteristically reserved in public comments, but the strategic logic is straightforward: Stripe gets PayPal's 400 million consumer accounts, its Braintree merchant business, and its Venmo infrastructure. Advent gets a trophy asset at what looks like a discount to PayPal's historical valuation. PayPal's board gets to decide whether Enrique Lores's turnaround plan is more credible than a $60.50 cash offer. PayPal board views $53B Stripe-Advent takeover bid as inadequate. Read more.
🇬🇧 Mulcahy brothers join Attio in acqui-hire: Limerick-based Y Combinator graduates Eoghan and Liam Mulcahy are joining Attio, the agentic CRM platform, in an acqui-hire. Their startup, Inconvo, built open-source tools for creating natural-language data agents on production databases. The Mulcahy brothers will join Attio's engineering team to expand its ecosystem of AI agents and integrations. Inconvo's open-source codebase remains available for developers. It's a clean outcome for a small, technically sharp team that built something genuinely useful — and a signal that the agentic CRM space is heating up fast. Read more.
🇪🇺 EI is Europe's busiest venture investor: A new PitchBook study confirms what the Irish startup ecosystem has known intuitively: Enterprise Ireland has backed more than 2,000 startups between 2016 and mid-2026, making it the most active venture capital investor in Europe by deal count. France's Bpifrance ranked second with 1,649 deals. Separately, PitchBook data for the first half of 2026 shows Irish startups completed 110 deals worth €500 million. The state agency's portfolio includes investments in companies now worth billions. Not bad for a government body. Read more
At home 🏠
Tines CEO Eoin Hinchy hinted at a major product launch on Monday, July 28, comparing current enterprise automation to "weeds" and the new product to a "gardening tool." Who doesn’t love gardening?
Velico, a Meath-based medical technology company that converts blood plasma into shelf-stable powder, is planning to scale its workforce from 55 to as many as 400 people over the next several years.
Google has plans to open “The Bakery,” a new Dublin office on Grand Canal Street for 1,900 staff, featuring an events hub. The company also reported contributing over €10 billion to Ireland's economy last year.
Dublin-based eyecare software firm Ocuco, has secured an €6 million in financing. The company offers practice management and lab software to optical retailers in 88 countries.
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🗺️ FOUNDER DIRECTORY
Dylan Fitzpatrick - Payfex Global
- Role: Founder, Payfex Global
- Base: Dubai, UAE
- Focus: Cross-border payments and FX risk management via a network of licensed financial institution partners.
- Stage: Early (founded 2025, bootstrapped)
Dylan Fitzpatrick is the Co-Founder & Director of Payfex Global. Raised in a big Dublin family alongside four brothers, Dylan was drawn early to global markets through his father's international career. He studied finance at DCU, then cut his teeth at Sysnet Global Solutions before joining Robotify, the Irish EdTech startup acquired by Imagine Learning for nearly €20m in 2022. His next move took him to Dubai with Revolut, where the intensity of hypergrowth fintech sharpened his instincts. The experience convinced him and his brother Cian that businesses needed something Revolut and Wise weren't offering: a high-touch, transparent intermediary, not another self-serve platform.
Payfex Global bridges that gap. Rather than holding its own licences, the company operates as a consultancy layer connecting businesses to tier-one licensed providers for cross-border payments, multi-currency IBANs, and FX hedging. Its dual Ireland-UAE base positions it squarely on a growing trade corridor, and the partner-first model means lighter regulatory overhead and faster execution. After a launch year that included Money20/20 and a growing founder network, 2026 is shaping up as the year Payfex proves the model at scale.
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🧠 BRAIN FOOD
5 other things we are snacking on this week
The 2026 Social Media Playbook for Founders. Michael Corcoran, former Head of Social at Ryanair and co-founder of Slice Social Consultancy, sits down with Gary Fox for a no-fluff guide to social media strategy for founders.
The LA Times examines how AI-driven layoffs are reshaping Ireland's technology workforce, not as a future-tense prediction but as a present-tense reality.
Inside Paddy Cosgrave's Whistleblower Bookshop. The Web Summit founder has opened a left-wing bookshop and café on South Anne Street in Dublin.
Self-driving cars are coming and Ireland is getting ready. Provizio CEO Barry Lunn sits down with The Big Tech Show to discuss why autonomous vehicle technology is accelerating, how Europe's regulatory path differs from the US, and what Limerick's role is in the global AV supply chain.
Ireland's government digital wallet: security, privacy, and the under-16 question. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties and Digital Rights Ireland have raised concerns about the government's new digital wallet — required under EU law by year-end.
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