Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.
👋 Céad míle fáilte! On Monday 19 October, Irish tech takes over Nasdaq.
Irish Tech Week New York is back for its fourth year, run by our good friends at Digital Irish, the volunteer-led nonprofit connecting Irish founders around the world. The conference day at Nasdaq has talks on what it really takes to build and scale in the US, four rounds of lightning pitches from Irish startups, and panels on AI agents, scaling and capital.
The line-up is strong. Declan Kelly of Consello, Oisin Hanrahan of Keychain, Nigel Eccles of Sentient Studios, Sean Blanchfield of Jentic and OpenAI's Eoin Reddy are among the speakers, alongside Nasdaq CMO Brian Buckley and Ireland's Consul General in New York, Gerald Angley. Last year, construction compliance startup Ralco raised $500,000 during the week.
If you are in New York that week, it is the room to be in. And if you are going, tell us. We would love to hear how it goes. You can grab a ticket here
TL;DR:
✈️ Abroad: Stripe agrees to buy Parafin, Manna's Bobby Healy says the US is open for business, Dún Laoghaire's TFI Marine signs with Sumitomo, and Superfy wins a Melbourne smart-bin contract.
🏠 At home: Budget 2027 puts €1bn into scaling, Australia's REA buys 35% of Daft's owner, Stripe adds 200 Dublin jobs, Opus 2 buys Cork's Bundledocs, and Irish Mist comes home.
👑 Founder Directory: Aisling Foley grew up on a farm in the south-east and now runs ExCulture in Delft, making heparin without the pigs.
💰 Investment tracker: CATAGEN lands UKEF-backed funding, Freight Island borrows £3m, and Nettle raises $4.8m.
🧠 Brain food: Mark Little on selling Storyful, why one Dublin founder chose the US, Colm McCarthy on the last tax bonanza, ten deep-tech companies to watch, and a Viennetta world record.
Enjoy ☕
LATEST UPDATES
News from abroad ✈️
🇦🇺 Superfy takes on Melbourne's bins: Superfy, the smart-waste company built by Taoglas co-founder Ronan Quinlan, has won a five-year contract in Melbourne after a 2025 pilot. It will roll out 500 solar-powered compacting bins and manage 3,000 existing ones across the CBD, Southbank and the riverside parks. Next up is its first external raise, about €2m, to fund international expansion. Bins are not glamorous. A five-year city contract is about as bankable as revenue gets. Read more.
🇺🇸 Stripe goes shopping again: Stripe, the payments giant founded by Patrick and John Collison, has agreed to buy Parafin, which lets software platforms offer financing to the small businesses using them. Founded in 2020, Parafin has funded more than $3bn to over 60,000 SMBs through partners including DoorDash, Amazon and Gusto. Terms were not disclosed. It lands a month after the $7bn OpenRouter deal we covered in August. Lending to merchants already on Stripe's rails is the obvious next pipe to lay. Read more.
🇺🇸 Manna moves the boss to Tulsa: Bobby Healy has relocated himself and the bulk of Manna's operations to Tulsa, Oklahoma. His verdict to Sifted fits in a headline: "The US is open for business, Europe is not." We flagged the mixed welcome in Oklahoma back in August. The founder has voted with his feet anyway. For anyone building in a regulated category at home, that line is worth sitting with for a minute. Read more.
🇯🇵 Dún Laoghaire signs with Sumitomo: TFI Marine has agreed a partnership with Sumitomo Corporation Global Metals, part of the Japanese trading house, to take its SeaSpring device into floating offshore wind. SeaSpring cuts the load and fatigue on mooring lines, which means shorter lines and a more compact footprint for each turbine. The pair will also look at manufacturing it in Japan. Chief executive John Herlihy called the endorsement a significant milestone. Sumitomo already knows its way around Irish companies, it bought Fyffes in 2017. Read more.
At home 🏠
Budget 2027 set aside €1bn over three years through ISIF to scale Irish companies at home, and cut capital gains tax from 33% to 31%.
REA Group, owner of realestate.com.au, is taking 35% of Distilled for €248m, valuing the Fallons' Daft.ie, DoneDeal and PropertyPal group at about €709m.
Stripe is adding 200 jobs at its Dublin HQ across engineering and go-to-market, after growing its Irish headcount by more than 35% this year to over 1,000.
Cork legal tech Bundledocs, used by more than 100 of the UK's top 200 law firms, has been acquired by London's Opus 2. It raised just €600,000 back in 2020.
Irish Mist is back in Irish hands. Old Canal Quay Spirits, led by drinks veteran David Phelan, bought the 1947 liqueur from US owner Heaven Hill.
📰 Have a story that needs to be told? Drop us a note here.
🗺️ FOUNDER DIRECTORY
Aisling Foley - ExCulture
Aisling Foley (left) with ExCulture co-founder Ilaria Poledri
- Role: Co-Founder & CEO, ExCulture
- Base: Delft, Netherlands
- Focus: Animal-free heparin made by fermentation
- Stage: Seed
Aisling Foley grew up on a small farm in the south-east, with cattle and a vegetable garden. She studied chemistry at UCD, interned at MSD in Tipperary, then went to Leiden for a master's in chemistry and science-based business. The company found her, not the other way round. A LinkedIn post from TU Delft's tech transfer office was looking for a founder to commercialise a patent-pending bioprocess, and she took it on with Leiden classmate Ilaria Poledri.
ExCulture uses mixed bacterial cultures to make an alternative to heparin, the blood thinner that one in three hospitalised patients needs. Today it comes from pigs, and China supplies 60 to 80% of the world's stock. Foley wants a safer supply made closer to home, without the animal. Backed by Capricorn Partners' Dutch Industrial Biotech Seed Fund and TTT Medtech, she also picked up a Termeer Foundation Transatlantic Connections Award last year.
Two more Irish founders new on the map:
🇳🇿 Fintan Blake | DataSing | Wellington. The Trinity graduate's team builds AI and data platforms for New Zealand government, with MBIE, the Ministry of Justice and WorkSafe among its clients.
🇦🇺 Fergal Coleman | Symphony3 | Melbourne. The UCD and University of Melbourne graduate co-founded the company behind SmartGlue, which has been wiring together local council systems since 2011.
🍀 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 💰
Katya Kinane pictured with her co-founder Jack Miller
🇮🇪 CATAGEN (Belfast) secured UK Export Finance-backed funding, amount undisclosed, to take its sustainable aviation fuel technology to market. Ryanair and Shell Aviation Ireland are partners.
🇬🇧 Freight Island (Newcastle) borrowed £3m from the Investment Fund for Northern Ireland to open in the old Debenhams. Belfast's Richard Irwin and Stephen Symington, the Titanic Distillers co-founders, are behind it.
🇬🇧 Nettle (London) raised a $4.8m seed led by MTech Capital for AI that runs insurance inspections about five times faster. Trinity graduate Katya Kinane co-founded it.
🧠 BRAIN FOOD
5 other things we are snacking on this week
Fastest time to eat a Viennetta: 1 min 15.30 seconds. Guinness World Records says the record belongs to Ireland's Rory Finlay. We have questions, mostly about brain freeze.
Mark Little on selling Storyful to Rupert Murdoch. Adrian Weckler's interview covers the $25m sale in 2013, working at Twitter with Jack Dorsey, and why social media should be burned to the ground.
'You can fail more': why one Dublin founder chose the US. The Business Post interviews the Dublin co-founder of Mendelia, a YC W26 AI startup, on building it in America.
Colm McCarthy on the last great tax bonanza. The economist on why the real test of this Budget is keeping room for the next downturn. Read it alongside the Budget news above.
Ten Irish-founded deep-tech companies to watch. Silicon Republic's list runs from Nasdaq-listed Horizon Quantum to Setanta Space Systems' satellite computer, with four UCD spin-outs in the mix.
Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.
💡 irish insights quick links:
Story idea? Send us a note
Founder Directory? Join today