Former Irish Nationwide chairman Michael Walsh, who rather dropped off the planet since the building society imploded under the leadership of Michael Fingleton, has invested some money into Brian McCarthy’s corporate forex de-risker Assure Hedge.
Walsh was censured for his role in the collapse of the building society, landing a three-year ban from managing any regulated financial services entity. I hear that his three-year ban ended in February.
Former derivatives trader McCarthy did a €5 million funding round in June to expand Assure Hedge. It doubled the number of clients using its forex hedging product last year and was valued at €30 million at the time of the new funding.
Other investors in the business include biotech entrepreneur Cormac Kilty, who sold his Biotrin firm for €25 million in 2008; members of the Crampton building dynasty; and former IFG boss Richard Hayes. Volatility on forex markets is brilliant news for someone.
Morrissey moves U2’s Mullen in mysterious ways
Musos band together. I hear that the fabulously wealthy U2 drummer Larry Mullen, above, has horsed money at a number of Kilkenny entrepreneur Brendan Morrissey’s projects. Mullen has put some moolah into a venture called Pain Medical through his Lama Investments vehicle.
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Morrissey was one of the founders of Kilkenny rock band My Little Funhouse, which signed for Geffen Records and played support to Guns N’ Roses at Slane in 1992. It didn’t happen for the band but Morrissey went on to be a highly successful tech investor and start-up founder, helping start social media app MobStar. Boosted by tie-ins with Miss World, the app, which acts as a voting platform for the pageant, has had more than one million downloads.
Morrissey used his social media nous to develop a number of other platforms including iDyslexic. He’s involved with schools-based data privacy and software integration play Wonde; music-sync licensing tool ProTunes; and AI-powered sound technology and social media platform TrueSound, which is aimed at the hard of hearing. The low-profile Mullen doesn’t scatter money around willy-nilly, so whatever Morrissey is drumming up, it seems that he has finally found what he’s looking for.
Pizza franchisee flips for payroll systems firm
Cork-based Domino’s Pizza franchisee Cathal McDonnell has emerged as a funder of Marc-Olivier Fiedler and Trevor Townsend’s global payroll company, Payzaar. The Carlow-headquartered Payzaar makes managing hugely complicated global payroll systems easier than falling off a greasy log. David Lawrence, who runs the hungry Pegasus corporate finance outfit, is also on the cap sheet. At Pegasus, Lawrence has fronted some mega-buyouts including the sale of Harvest to Irish Life, the Openmind management buyout and the €25 million sale of Gerard Kelly’s alarm company HKC to Assa Abloy.
The Payzaar fundraiser brought in just €2 million but attracted heavyweight funding including the support of Oliver Samwer, the German billionaire founder of Rocket Internet.
Payzaar and Fidelma McGuirk’s Payslip could be creating the beginning of a payroll tech cluster.
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Kelly’s hero is a Berlin-based start-up backer
I see Declan Kelly, one of the co-founders of the Web Summit with Paddy Cosgrave, is setting up a new investment group.
Kelly helped run the Web Summit-linked venture fund Amaranthine and is now behind the Berlin-based Foreword, which he describes as “an early stage micro-fund backing start-ups through their initial chapters”.
Kelly has got form when it comes to picking winners. At Amaranthine he helped fund conference software group Hopin, which generated a near hundredfold return for its early seed investors.
He has also personally bankrolled a number of hot start-ups at a very early stage. This includes Shane Curran’s data play Evervault, which raised $16 million (€13.4 million) from Silicon Valley royalty including Index Ventures, Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins; Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz; and former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos. Kelly’s other heroes includes Roadie.io, Anytype.io and Localyze. Moving forward is the only way.
Big bosses have a flutter in Galway
While Roundstone might be full of all the usual suspects, the Galway Races wasn’t, thanks to Covid. Randox founder Peter FitzGerald, who is having a great Covid because of all the testing his company provides, landed the biggie with Royal Rendezvous winning the Galway Plate.
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Pearse Mee’s family won the Monami Construction maiden with 9-4 favourite Zero Ten. Mee bagged plenty of zeros when selling AMT-Sybex to Capita for over €100 million. There were also many near misses. John Lavery, an early backer of Eddie O’Connor’s Airtricity and later Mainstream Renewables, saw his Quizical just touched off in the Colm Quinn mile at a tasty 33-1. His Due North almost landed a huge gamble in the Caulfield maiden but came up short. H+K kitchens founder David Bobbett’s Mr Coldstone was favourite in the Easyfix handicap but did not land a punch. Sean Mulryan of the Ballymore Group also had a second and a fourth.
Billionaire developer Luke Comer and the Acheson family of Dornan Engineering also had runners — and they may still be running.
Hanrahan spends — in moderation
Oisin Hanrahan, above, the Dubliner running the €6.5 billion Nasdaq-listed home services group Angi, has taken a punt on artificial intelligence solving the big problem of moderating content oozing from the sewer of online. Hanrahan has taken a small stake in Checkstep, a London-based start-up that has just raised a modest enough €1.45 million in a seed funding round.
Social media giants such as Facebook currently rely on human moderators to scroll through a bazillion items of content and decide whether they should be spiked. This takes time and is costly — not to mention having a human toll. Checkstep speeds up the process using its contextual moderation tool.
Hanrahan took over the reins at Angi earlier this year after joining the company when it bought his Handy start-up. Angi is trying to become the Uber of household tasks, matching customers with tradesmen who can do stuff such as paint a room or fix a roof.
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● I hear that Suretank entrepreneur Pat Joy is now behind Lukas Decker’s Coindrum. There’s a lot of smart travel or travel technology cash backing Decker, including Irelandia’s Declan Ryan, of the Ryanair founding family, who is now kicking over the low-cost carrier traces in Colombia. Coindrum initially rolled out hardware in airports that allowed travellers to convert local currency coins into vouchers for a 10 per cent higher amount. It also moved into the high street. When passengers return to airports, it could take off.
