by Guillaume Van Aelst

I came across this article called “20 Irish startups that will rock you the Celtic way!” which, as its name implies, discusses about 20 “emerging technology” start-ups founded between 2008 and 2015 in Ireland through (mostly) Irish funders

I am interested today in analysing the most common type of fund available to start-ups.

Instead of discussing this article as it was, I chose to produce a table out of it to make it more visual.

A few “issues” to keep in mind before showing this table is that:

• The values are sometimes in Euros and sometimes in Dollars but in order to make it easier, I summed them all as Dollars.
• Many (11) funding were undisclosed or still in process.
• The article does not always specify whether the source of the fund is Irish or not.
• No specification as to the number of jobs created through those start-ups.

Here is the table:

As you can see, the most common type of funding for a start-up is the “Seed” with 14 out of the 20 being funded one although the “Series A” & “Series B” seem to be getting higher investments.

Through the available data of these 20 start-ups, we can observe that these received a total of just below $70 million in funding equating to an average of $3.5 million per start-up.

Here is a quick overview of the meaning of the different funding types:

Mix: Used solely for the purpose of this analysis as no type of funding was specified.

Convertible Note: Is a first round loan of money that converts into shares in the future.

Seed: Very early stage of investment through which the investor gets an equity stake in the company.

Angel: Is an affluent person investing in start-up(s) in exchange of a convertible debt or ownership equity (Wikipedia, 2015)

Venture: Usually arise after the seed funding, is an investment in exchange for equity in the company.

Series A: Refers to the financing of the company through the selling of “preferred” stock.

Series B: Is the second round of private equity financing. Occurs after specific milestones have been passed.

Awards & Grants: Event such as “Bank of Ireland Startup Awards” (see previous blog) which provides grants in exchange for publicity for example.

Bootstrapped: Avoidance of outside investors though personal credit-card funding for example.

Self-funded: Self-explanatory, when the fund comes out of personal (or familial) sources.

(Korbet, 2015)

Guillaume Van Aelst.

Bibliography

Korbet, R., 2015. 20 Irish startups that will rock you the Celtic way!. [Online]
Available at: http://www.geektime.com/2015/05/21/20-irish-startups-that-will-rock-you-the-celtic-way/
[Accessed 07 12 2015].

Wikipedia, 2015. Angel investor. [Online]
Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_investor
[Accessed 07 12 2015].