20 Irish Start-ups and their Funding
Sources of Funding
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].
Leave a comment