24.6.2026

Ireland is building world-class startups. The scaleup chapter is harder to write.

Earlier this month, Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Fin, formerly Intercom, for approximately $3.6 billion. If completed, it will be widely regarded as the largest exit for an Irish-founded technology company. 

It’s worth pausing on what that represents. A business that started in a Dublin coffee shop in 2011 became one of Ireland’s first unicorns, scaled into a global category-definer, and is now set to join one of the most acquisitive software companies in the world. The company may be headquartered in San Francisco, but it kept a substantial base in Dublin throughout. Its founders remain closely connected to the Irish ecosystem, and a generation of Irish employees will now share in the outcome. 

That is exactly the kind of scaleup chapter Ireland needs more of. It is also a useful lens through which to read a quieter set of numbers that landed a few weeks earlier. 

The IVCA’s VenturePulse report for Q1 2026 landed recently, and one number has dominated the conversation: €221.7m in venture funding into Irish SMEs, down significantly across most deal sizes. In a climate already shaped by global uncertainty, tariff turbulence and tightening investor discipline, it is tempting to read that as a warning sign. I would encourage a more careful read. 

Investment in transactions below €1m increased quarter on quarter. The deals that did close tell a story of genuine, world-class Irish innovation: Neurent Medical raising €62.5m; Aerska closing €33m in biotech; and Evervault securing €21m in cybersecurity, with Sequoia and Ribbit Capital at the table. Deals like these do not happen by accident. They are not flukes. They are proof that Irish founders are building companies that compete globally. The funding market has not broken. It has become more disciplined. That is a different problem, and in some ways, a more useful one to solve. 

The gap that the numbers don’t show 

What the IVCA data captures is activity. What it does not capture are the companies that did not make it to a funding round at all: the ones that stalled between Series A and Series B, or that raised early but could not convert momentum into the kind of operational maturity that serious investors now demand. 

That is the scaleup gap. And it has been hiding in plain sight for years. 

Ireland has long been acknowledged as a strong environment for early-stage companies. Enterprise Ireland, the accelerator ecosystem, and a genuinely collegiate founder community have created real energy at the start of the journey. Successive government reports and commentators point to the same fault line: Irish companies often lose ground at scale. They get acquired earlier than they might otherwise, relocate to access deeper capital markets, or simply plateau.  

The conversation tends to focus on capital availability, and rightly so. Better access to growth capital, particularly at Series B and beyond, matters. The constraint has never been a shortage of Irish capital, it’s the absence of sufficient incentives and structures to put it to work, which is particularly frustrating with roughly €170 billion sitting in low-yield deposits while ambitious companies struggle to close Series B rounds. Encouragingly, that gap is now firmly on the policy agenda, through a planned retail investment account to mobilise household savings, dedicated SME scaling funds, and a sharper Enterprise Ireland focus on later-stage capital. The direction is right; the imperative however is to go further and faster. But in my experience, the barrier is often not just capital. It is the infrastructure around the business. 

What investors are scrutinising right now 

The era of growth at all costs is over. That shift has been well documented globally, but its implications for Irish founders are still being absorbed. 

In a more selective market, investors are spending longer on diligence. They are asking harder questions, not just about the product or the market, but about the business behind the business. Can the leadership team articulate its unit economics clearly? Is the financial reporting investor-grade, or is it held together with spreadsheets and goodwill? Is there a credible person at the table who can answer the CFO-level questions when they come? 

These are not unreasonable asks. They are the basics. But for many brilliant founders who have been rightly focused on product and customers, building that financial infrastructure has been deferred. It feels like a problem for later. Until later arrives. 

The lesson I would draw from the companies that closed meaningful rounds in Q1 is not simply that quality still gets funded. It is that preparedness now matters more. That distinction matters more now than it did two years ago. 

The structural question for Irish founders 

There is a broader point worth making here, one that goes beyond any individual company. 

Ireland is at an interesting moment. The FDI model that underpinned so much of our economic growth remains a major national strength, but the strategic case for building genuinely indigenous, scaling Irish companies has become harder to ignore. Scale Ireland, Enterprise Ireland and others are making that argument loudly and rightly. 

But ambition without infrastructure is just aspiration. If Ireland is serious about developing a cohort of scaling companies that stay Irish, grow Irish jobs and compete on the global stage, then the ecosystem around those companies needs to mature alongside them. That means better access to growth capital at Series B and beyond. It means more experienced operator-advisers who have actually sat inside scaling businesses. And it means founders taking financial credibility as seriously as product credibility earlier than feels necessary. 

What the Fin deal tells us about the scaleup chapter 

Intercom did not become acquirable by accident. Over recent years, the company made hard, decisive choices: repricing its core product, walking away from revenue it had previously banked, and committing early and fully to AI while the direction of the market was still uncertain. That is operational discipline at the sharp end: the willingness to rebuild the business around where the market is going rather than where it has been. It is the same quality, seen at an earlier stage, that investors now look for in companies a fraction of the size. 

It is also a more complicated story than a simple Irish success. The company moved its headquarters to San Francisco to reach the capital and customers it needed, and the proposed outcome is a sale to a larger US acquirer. This is the pattern that has shaped Irish scaling for two decades. What is different is the scale at which it happened, and what it leaves behind: a deep bench of operators who have now built and sold at the highest level, and a cohort of employees whose payouts will, if past cycles are any guide, seed the next wave of Irish founders and angel investors. 

That recycling of talent and capital is how ecosystems mature. It is the part of the story that outlasts any transaction. 

A more honest conversation 

The Q1 IVCA numbers are far from a crisis. But they are a prompt. 

For founders in growth mode, the question is not whether the funding market has changed. It has. The question is whether your business is being built to meet it. The companies that will define the next chapter of Irish enterprise will not just have great ideas. They will have the operational discipline and financial clarity to make investors confident that their capital will be well deployed. 

That is not a new standard. It is just one that is being enforced more consistently than before. 

Fin’s proposed acquisition is a milestone worth celebrating. The real prize is a pipeline of companies built well enough to write many more chapters like it. 

To continue the conversation, please contact: 

Stephen Kinch, Partner, Head of Scaling Services
Stephen.Kinch@eisneramper.ie
or +353 85 818 6801