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👋 Céad míle fáilte! This newsletter focuses on Irish tech achievements around the globe, but I wanted to switch focus for a moment to highlight someone who achieved so much on the global stage in athletics and has inspired many Irish people worldwide, including me. Ciara Mageean died on Sunday aged 34.
The Portaferry runner carried Ireland on the international stage for a decade. She ran the 1500m at two Olympics, Rio and Tokyo, won European bronze in 2016 and silver in 2022, took Commonwealth silver the same year, and in Rome in 2024 became European 1500m champion. She still holds the Irish records at 800m, 1000m, 1500m and the mile.
She told the country about her stage four bowel cancer in July 2025, and married Thomas Moran at Belfast City Hall last month. David Gillick put it simply: she was "a beautiful person on the track and off the track".
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.
Back to tech, where Galway's Evan Jones has a seat at the top table. Having worked closely with Elon Musk on how X pays its users, he is about to close a $100m Series B for Standard Economics, the company he founded last year, Business Post reports.
Its first app, Uno, reached tens of millions of users across Latin America and Southeast Asia in a year, and Lightspeed is already a backer. He taught Musk's bird to pay its way. Now the VCs are paying him.
TL;DR:
✈️ Abroad: Laura Modi gives Bobbie a Mind Yourself Day, Vectigo takes on Colorado's black ice, and BEX Group buys in Bristol.
🏠 At home: a record 120 Irish start-ups head to Web Summit, ex-PayPal James Foskin launches TiAiMe, Federico Pucciariello eyes a €360m fuel plant, TikTok cuts 600 Irish jobs, and StormHarvester signs up a $1bn exit veteran for the US.
👑 Founder Directory: Craig Reynolds runs Bingo Loco's 2,000 shows a year out of Denver.
💰 Investment tracker: Lette raises $6.5m, Levels lands €100,000, Nomadic Watches wins €150,000, and Breadly takes €50,000.
🧠 Brain food: Ciaran Martin on the Binance heist, Oracle bets on a 19-year-old, Investor Finn on Anthropic, Flipdish's cash crunch, and Ed O'Riordan's week.
Enjoy ☕
LATEST UPDATES
News from abroad ✈️
Laura Modi, CEO and co-founder of Bobbie
🇺🇸 Mind yourself, Mayo style: Westport's Laura Modi gave her whole Bobbie team a day off late last month to book the check-ups they keep putting off. She called it Mind Yourself Day, "borrowing from every Irish mother who has shouted it out the door". Modi left Airbnb to build Bobbie, now the only female-founded and mom-led baby formula company in the US, and it passed $100m in revenue within 18 months of launching in 2021. Read more.
🇺🇸 Black ice, meet Dublin hardware: Vectigo's US division is putting its solar-powered road sensors into Colorado. Founded in 2024 by Sinéad O'Sullivan and Brendan Lundy, the Dublin start-up embeds sensors in the lane that light up in heavy snow, warn drivers before black ice and flag wrong-way traffic, while feeding the same data to autonomous vehicles. It has raised $1.9m so far and is heading towards a $2.2m raise. "Every winter, Colorado drivers face black ice they cannot see," said Lundy, its executive chair. Read more.
🇬🇧 Dublin buys in Bristol: BEX Group, the Dublin building electrification business behind the ROBUS, FuseBox and ATC brands, has bought Termination Technology, a Bristol supplier of cable accessories. BEX already sells through more than 2,500 wholesalers in over 40 countries, and opened a 108,000 sq ft warehouse in Widnes earlier this year. Two UK moves in one year, and the direction of travel is clear. Read more.
At home 🏠
Web Summit in Lisbon (9 to 12 November) will have 120+ Irish start-ups exhibiting, a record, with more than 1,000 Irish people travelling over. In 2017 there were two.
TiAiMe is launching this month after a 50-family pilot. James Foskin left school at 17, spent two decades at PayPal, and has put around €60,000 into the family-scheduling AI so far.
Former Munster star Federico Pucciariello's Essential Energy Holding is weighing a €360m sustainable aviation fuel plant in the Republic, possibly at Foynes in Co Limerick.
TikTok's Irish arm cut its headcount by 600 last year as legal provisions rose past €900m, and Echelon is paying it €100m over a shelved Irish data centre plan.
StormHarvester, Brian Moloney's Belfast wastewater AI company, has named Colby Manwaring as a board advisor for its US push. He ran Innovyze through its roughly $1bn sale to Autodesk.
📰 Have a story that needs to be told? Drop us a note here.
🗺️ FOUNDER DIRECTORY
Craig Reynolds - Bingo Loco
Locomotive co-founders, from left: Craig Reynolds, Stephen Lawless and Will Meara
- Role: Co-founder, Locomotive (Bingo Loco)
- Base: Denver, USA
- Focus: Live entertainment, touring bingo rave shows
- Stage: Bootstrapped, founded 2017
Craig Reynolds studied at DIT and has, in his words, "operated in live events since university". In 2017 he, Will Meara and Stephen Lawless talked 100 friends into a Dublin basement on a rainy Thursday night to play bingo with a DJ. They had already tried yoga disco nights and hot tubs in nightclubs.
That night became Locomotive and its flagship show, Bingo Loco. It now runs 2,000 shows a year across 15 countries and 300 cities, selling more than a million tickets and $24m in ticket sales, according to Fortune. Reynolds moved to Denver in 2025, and the company made it its North American headquarters the following year.
Two more Irish founders new on the map:
🇪🇸 Paul Tighe | Copernicus | Madrid. His firm invests in and manages non-performing loans and distressed real estate, from a Madrid headquarters with offices in Milan, Athens and Lima.
🇦🇺 Jess Doyle | In Memory of You | Perth. Her non-profit donates Memory Boxes and Miscarriage Keepsake Packs to hospitals across Western Australia for parents who have lost a baby.
🍀 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
THE INVESTMENT TRACKER
Who raised this week 💰
Levels co-founders Micheál Dunne (left) and Shane Doherty
🇮🇪 Lette (Dublin) raised a $6.5m seed led by Peak, with Des Traynor among the angels, for AI that runs leasing and resident support for UK rental operators. We covered its $1.4m pre-seed last October.
🇮🇪 Levels (Kilkenny) secured €100,000 from Enterprise Ireland's Pre-Seed Start Fund for software that prices hotel rooms, and launches this week with 20 Irish hotels signed up.
🇮🇪 Nomadic Watches (Belfast) won the €150,000 gold award in Stelios Haji-Ioannou's North-South Business Cooperation Awards. Peter McAuley runs the watchmaker with his wife, Jane.
🇮🇪 Breadly (Newry) won €50,000 at the Northern Ireland final of InterTradeIreland's Seedcorn competition. Georgia Heaney and James Kirwan moved home from Australia to build its AI money-saving tool.
🧠 BRAIN FOOD
5 other things we are snacking on this week
Omagh's Ciaran Martin on the Binance heist. The former CEO of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre talks Channel 4 News through the $6.3bn crypto theft.
"Oracle took a bet on a 19yo." Liam Fuller on getting the call to present his start-up, Source, in Vegas, then doing it two weeks later.
Investor Finn: why I wouldn't want to invest in Anthropic right now. A contrarian take from Business Post's investing column.
Cash crunch to unicorn. Flipdish co-founder Conor McCarthy tells the Irish Independent how they built it.
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