Still don’t know where all the Irish VC monies goes to – please help us by updating your company profile on Crunchbase.
The Irish Times also has an article on Business Expansion Schemes – and gives a mention to Loudervoice – we should see quite a few Irish technology companies availing of BES schemes this year.
WRI has about 90 staff, with overseas bases in Shanghai and Sydney. As well as Mooney and the co-founders, its directors include chairman Fintan Drury, former Aer Lingus chief financial officer Brian Dunne and Mark Opzoomer, the former managing director of Yahoo! in Europe.
The company was valued at about €400 million in 2004 when it raised external funding from Summit Partners, a US venture capital company. However, it bought back some of Summit Partners' shares in 2006 as part of a corporate restructuring.
The 2007 accounts show the firm paid €35 million to Summit Partners for those shares. As part of that process, a total of €12.2 million was paid to trusts owned by Nolan, Kennedy and fellow director Paddy Holahan, and a further €1.5 million was paid to WRI directors and key management.
First Roomex.com won the Deloitte Technology Rising Star Award for 2008. With growth of over 3,100% over the last 3 years, Roomex.com is fast becoming one of the most widely used booking hotel portals in Ireland and Europe.
IQContent came in at Number 8 in the top 50. The team there have built a fantastic business with a focus on usability and accessibility in building great websites for an impressive range of clients.
I’ll update this post when Deloitte actually publishes the full list!
OK, they aren’t really but Sligo is actually their first commercial office outside of the US. The coverage of the PollDaddy acquisition has been amazing in a few short hours. Here’s just a sample:
Polldaddy is the default online poll service for leading blogs, social networks and websites – and the acquisition by WordPress parent – Automattic – makes total sense – and the team dynamics is brilliant.
Only 2 developers [Lenny and Eoin] on polldaddy – which was initially incubated within Infacta.
It was spun out as a seperate entity late in 2007 – with angel investment provided by Infacta and Polldaddy founder, Jonathan Hill.
Polldaddy also recruited Scott Rafer as an advisor in 2007 – and Scott played no small part in assisting the project in getting to its current scale.
The Polldaddy is great validation for Web2Ireland – especially given the level of investment, the operations, and the acquisition result.
Given the recent news on Facebook setting up in Ireland – it perhaps set a new model for the IDA/EI – International operations get setup via acquisition [which is what Israel have done for years].
A call out to Web2Ireland community – the LeWeb’08: StartUp Competition is a great opportunity for folks to connect with the web community in Europe [Le Web is one of the top events globally - so here is your chance].
SeedCamp is helping to select the companies – and facilitating the competition during the conference – 30 companies will be selected from the applications submitted and will demonstrate in front of a panel of expert judges. The winners of this competition will then have a chance to present their companies on the LeWeb main stage during a special session on December 10.
31st of October 2008 by conor
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