Top tech companies in Dublin
Dublin is recognised as one of Europe’s most attractive technology hubs. In fact, it’s often referred to as “The Silicon Valley of Europe”. Little wonder when you consider that the capital’s “Silicon Docks” is home to the European headquarters of Google, Meta and Amazon.
A combination of low corporation tax, a plethora of skilled workers and reliable infrastructure means the city is an accelerator, and incubator, of technological entrepreneurship. Post-Brexit, it helps that the Irish capital is the largest English-speaking country in the European Union.
Aside from big industry leaders, here are some of Dublin’s most notable technology firms. We’ve grouped them by categories for ease of reading.
Software companies in Dublin
Wellola
Founded in 2016, Wellola is a communications platform designed for the healthcare industry. Its main offering – an app named Portasana – is essentially a portal allowing healthcare providers to communicate with patients while, simultaneously, making it possible for patients to go through their health records, manage appointments, and view and respond to questionnaires and resources shared by their providers.
Similar to another Irish software company listed below – Webio – the benefit for clients is how much they stand to save by moving their communications with customers online. On its site, Wellola estimates that for a hospital serving 1.5 million patients, those savings come close to £2 million a year.
For patients, it can certainly be helpful to have a digital copy of their records that dispenses with keeping physical copies or noting down information that might prove to be important. There are also many occasions when matters can be resolved remotely, saving the patient a trip to a facility and making matters simpler for the provider from a capacity management point of view.
The trend towards remote healthcare assistance, aided by digital transformation in the sector, only accelerated with the Covid-19 pandemic. And there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. That transformation heralds good news for Wellola, which has since opened offices in Leeds, UK as well as in Fürth, Germany.
We’ve previously published a feature on the top tech companies in Leeds.
The company works closely with the NHS – including partnering with NHS Digital which enables users to log in through the NHS Login and the NHS Smartcard – and counts among its customers Leeds Teaching Hospital NHS Trust, Birmingham Community NHS Foundation Trust and Nutricia Danone (through which it reaches 170 nursing homes in Ireland).
SwiftComply
Talk about a SaaS company using technology for the betterment of the planet. You probably never heard of SwiftComply. Yet you might be one of the 50 million North Americans that interact with a product it makes safer: water.
Officially founded in 2018, the company’s story traces all the way back to 2008, when its now CEO Michael O’Dwyer worked as an engineer for the Dublin City Council. At the time, the company had a growing problem with how it handled fat, oil and grease (FOG), released by the food industry into water streams.
Working on that particular problem made Michael realise how broken the regulatory process was. It gave him the insight that there was a need for a SaaS compliance offering that helped water utility companies change how they handled and interacted with their customers. SwiftCompy was the result.
The company has since moved its headquarters to Pleasanton, California, which is understandable given that it works with more than 400 cities in the North American market. It has also expanded its offering beyond FOG, with its software now being used in backflow, pretreatment and stormwater management.
Kianda Technologies
In December 2022, Gartner predicted that by 2026, “developers outside formal IT departments would account for at least 80% of the user base for low-code development tools”. It also estimated the no-code/low-code market to be worth more than $26 billion in 2023 alone. Kianda Technologies is one of the many players vying for some of that market share, with an article by the Irish Times in 2021 citing it as having more than 25,000 users at the time.
The company seems to do particularly well serving the Construction industry and has recently released EHSwise, its off-the-shelf solution for Environmental, Health and Safety, and Quality (EHSQ) management.
Construction as an industry is still going through a period of digital transformation, particularly in developing countries. A lot of work is still done with recourse to pen and paper, often aided, at best, by spreadsheets.
Yet there’s much to gain from going digital: better record-keeping often leads to cost savings, strengthened compliance and better data to derive insights. Given its low-code/no-code routes, Kianda is appealing to customers who want to move their processes to digital formats but might not necessarily have the DevOps to do so.
Mind you, Kianda serves companies of all sizes, not just smaller businesses with sparse IT resources. One of its main clients is DEME, a $3.3 billion company with more than 5,000 employees, which specialises in dredging services for the offshore energy and maritime infrastructure markets.
Volograms
Volograms, founded in 2018, is a technology startup that makes reality capture more accessible.
Its service offers the ability to turn video into 3D renderings, without the need for multi-camera capture, professional lighting or even green screens. Customers can use a handheld consumer device with a camera, process the video through Volograms’ web app and turn it into a volumetric hologram (or “volograms” as the company refers to them). You can see it in action in the following video:
This kind of augmented reality experience can be useful for businesses looking to jazz up its sales and marketing collateral, demo a product or application or simply communicate with its staff in a different way.
TechFinitive would like to also call out that it could be used to smuggle secret plans to retired generals from the Rebel Alliance.
Webio
Award-winning Webio has been in business since 2016, offering a range of automation and chatbot solutions for contact centres. The company specialises in enabling digital customer communications to be centralised and tackled from one interface, reducing the need for human intervention when working with customers. It does so regardless of channel, meaning that companies interacting with customers on third-party applications such as WhatsApp, Messenger or Telegram, can orchestrate their responses from Webio’s application.
During the Q&A of a recent webinar, the company stated that while a traditional 15-minute phone call might cost a contact centre an average of £2.00, that same conversation tackled digitally might cost £0.30.
Related reading:
– The business case for WhatsApp – benefits vs risks
– Future of Work – understanding how AI will impact customer service jobs
More recently the company launched DebtChat, a “conversational AI web chat solution” designed with credit, collections and payments customers in mind. The company lists Snap Finance and Hoist Finance as some of its success stories in the space.
In 2023, Webio became a Great Place To Work certified company and was also named among the Best Workplaces™ in Tech.
Cybersecurity companies in Dublin
Oblivious
At a time when data privacy concerns are at an all-time high, Oblivious has found its calling in creating tools that enable companies to manage and interact with data in a more secure manner.
To understand what it does, we need to briefly explain what “enclaves” in technology are, as those are at the core of Oblivious’ offering. An enclave is essentially a server with very restrictive security protocols built in, which means that data going in and out of the enclave is less open for scrutiny. Think of it as an isolated environment that doesn’t share information with its surroundings.
Enclaves are helpful when you want to ensure that, for example, the app you are building and the data it processes, is subject to stringent access controls. A use case would be storing personal data for data analytics purposes while limiting who can access individual records, including barring the host itself from doing so.
Major cloud platforms such as AWS offer enclaves as a service, with an example being AWS Nitro Enclaves. Yet, the process of configuring and governing these enclaves is not simple – and that’s where Oblivious comes in. Oblivious has created tools that make it simpler for engineers and developers to deploy APIs in a secure manner, leveraging enclaves to ensure the data itself is kept away from prying eyes.
In April 2023, the company secured €5.35 million in VC funding led by Cavalry Ventures. In 2022, it was a recipient of the Advancing Trustworthy AI Award from CeADAR Ireland, the country’s technology centre for the advancement of artificial intelligence.
Evervault
One other company at the heart of Ireland’s cybersecurity scene is Evervault. Founded in 2019, it focuses on encryption, to an extent that you could almost describe as encryption-as-a-service or encryption infrastructure. Its wide range of products provides developers with tools to secure applications while, simultaneously, ensuring data being transferred, stored or accessed, is done so in a secure manner.
Its mission statement is to “encrypt the web”, with the company’s CEO, Shane Curran, stating in a blog post that “While encryption isn’t the only security tool, it’s the most important one”, a sentiment also shared by Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels. In that same blog post, another statement very much explains why Evervault does what it does:
If everything is encrypted, it doesn’t matter if an app gets breached because what gets breached is useless, unreadable data.
As of writing the company is PCI DSS Level 1 compliant, and undergoes external SOC 2 Assessments annually. The company lists Square, Visa and The Irish Times among its customers.
Fintech companies in Dublin
InvoiceFair
InvoiceFair’s pitch is simple: leverage your past, present and future revenues to secure instant funding.
Established in 2015 by co-founders Helen Cahill and Peter Brady, this Irish fintech company has won several awards over the years, including Deloitte’s Most Disruptive Fintech of 2019.
Customers can upload invoices into InvoiceFair’s platform and those invoices essentially act as the “collateral” against which they obtain a loan. Businesses with over €1 million turnover in recurring annual revenue can also leverage that predictability for upfront access to cash. There are other collateral mechanisms that can be used to access funding, but the principle is always the same.
The – almost – instant cash flow means that businesses can capitalise on pressing opportunities, move quicker and, in theory, fuel their growth by not having to wait for payment on those invoices before they make their next move. This level of agility can help startups and bootstrapped businesses tremendously, enabling them to pivot and innovate much faster than they normally would.
Naturally, none of this comes for free; InvoiceFair estimates its all-in cost of funding to range from 0.75% to 1.50% per 30 days, depending on the product type, term, credit quality and a number of other factors.
Corlytics
Last but certainly not least, we bring you another company that has also been recognised by CeADAR, Ireland’s National Centre for Applied AI: Corlytics.
While we are categorising Corlytics in our fintech section, that’s mostly due to the success of its software in helping finance customers. Product-wise, regulatory compliance and analytics are at the heart of what Corlytics does, with its software assisting a range of clients – from global banks through to private investment managers, insurance companies and payment service providers – with keeping up with changing regulations.
Corlytics’ solutions are helpful for finance companies of any size. Yet they become almost essential for medium-to-enterprise businesses or companies operating in sensitive or quickly changing verticals.
Take cryptocurrencies as an example. In the last 2-3 years alone, governments all around the world have released hundreds of new regulatory measures, with more being introduced every month. It would be extremely time-consuming – and in some cases impossible – to stay up to date on those changes without the help of solutions such as Corlytics’, which aggregates all that information and then enables businesses to prioritise what to tackle (and keep track of progress).
Tech companies around the world
This article is part of a growing series covering tech companies across different cities around the world! We’ve already mentioned Leeds above; check out our list of tech companies in Reading and the Thames Valley as well as tech companies in Cork, Ireland. Here are other cities we’ve covered to date:
Ricardo Oliveira
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