Elkstone

Stephen Dowling SC didn't set out to build a legal tech company. He set out to fix problems he'd lived through firsthand, case after case. Having spent 20 years as a barrister practicing commercial litigation, Stephen built TrialView, an AI platform that helps legal teams manage, prepare and present disputes, from paralegals to partners, counsel to courts. TrialView cuts the time it takes to organise and analyse case material, which means faster preparation, faster hearings, and faster access to justice for the people waiting on them. As Stephen puts it, the next frontier of legal AI won't be decided by features it'll be decided by accuracy and trust. Stephen is just as candid about the harder parts of being a founder: "People underestimate how hard it is setting up a business and being able to accept setbacks. It's like what Churchill said about success, one disappointment to the next, with enthusiasm." It's a trait we often see in founders we back at Elkstone, the ones who reshape an industry are usually the ones who refused to accept how it's always been done and want to make a difference. #FounderFiles #Elkstone #TrialView #LegalTech #AI #IrishVenture #Marketing Niall McEvoy Sarah Bogossian Barry Brennan Caolfhionn McCarthy

Sales plans don't fail because reps underperform. They fail because the plan was never grounded in reality to begin with.   Werner Schmidt spent 20 years leading global operations and enablement teams inside some of the fastest-growing SaaS companies. Across all of them, he kept seeing the same gap: leadership making high-stakes revenue calls on guesswork, because nobody could reliably measure what was actually driving or blocking sales performance.   That gap is why he founded Lative. It's an AI decision intelligence platform that connects sales strategy to execution in real time, giving CROs the confidence to make the call, RevOps the model to run it, and Finance the assumptions they can actually trust.   It's the pattern we keep backing at Elkstone: founders who've lived inside a problem long enough to know the fix isn't more data it's clarity everyone in the room can actually act on. That's what Lative gives revenue teams: a real-time view of growth efficiency, built for CROs, RevOps and Finance to work from the same numbers.   #FounderFiles #Elkstone #Lative #RevOps #AI #IrishVenture #Marketing Niall McEvoy Sarah Bogossian Barry Brennan Cillian Sugrue Caolfhionn McCarthy

82% of venture funding into Irish SMEs came from international investors in H1 2025. That number should give us pause. New Irish Venture Capital & Private Equity Association VenturePulse data shows €578.4m was invested into Irish SMEs in the first half of the year. Down 10% year-on-year with international investors accounting for the vast majority of that capital, one of the highest concentrations on record. It's a sign of real strength: Ireland continues to punch above its weight in attracting global capital. But it's also a vulnerability. Ireland has a real opportunity to mobilise more of its own pension and institutional capital into indigenous scaling companies. We've become excellent at attracting international investment. The next step is making sure more of our own long-term savings can participate in the value being created here at home. This is exactly the gap Elkstone Venture Fund II is built to help close, investing in Ireland's next tech wave by backing ambitious early-stage Irish companies with the patient capital they need to scale. If you're an investor who wants to be ready for what comes next get in touch to learn more about Venture Fund II. #Marketing #VentureCapital #VentureFundII Joe Bergin Niall McEvoy

Ireland's venture story is diversifying. Medtech. Quantum computing. Cyber Security, Fintech. AI Native software. The best of Irish venture isn’t confined to one sector and neither is Elkstone. We've backed over 70 companies, helped them raise more than €1 billion in follow-on funding, and supported over 3,000 jobs along the way. Some names you'll know: LetsGetChecked, Flipdish, Manna Air Delivery, Protex AI, Luminate, ZeroRisk.io. Many more you're about to. Over the coming weeks, we're handing the mic directly to the founders who are ready for what comes next. An honest account of the vision and ambition to build a category-defining company in Ireland. First up: Overpath. Most sales teams find out a deal is dying only after it's already dead. That's the problem Ross Keating and Dermot O'Connor set out to fix. Overpath embeds AI agents directly into B2B sales workflows reading live deal behaviour to catch execution gaps early and coach reps before a deal stalls, not after the forecast slips. It's a shift from sales coaching as post-mortem to sales coaching as live intervention. Instead of a manager reviewing what went wrong in last month's pipeline review, reps get a nudge while there's still a deal to save. It's exactly the kind of founder insight we back at Elkstone: spotting a problem every sales leader has quietly learned to live with and building the tool that makes living with it optional. #FounderFiles #Elkstone #Overpath #AI #SalesTech #IrishVenture Niall McEvoy Sarah Bogossian Barry Brennan Cillian Sugrue Caolfhionn McCarthy

Proud to back ZeroRisk as they close a $10M Series A. 🎉 Elkstone first invested at seed stage, when Gary Nolan and the team laid out a clear thesis: merchant cyber risk had outgrown the annual compliance checklist. They were right. Today's merchants face scams, credential theft, website vulnerabilities and device-level attacks daily, not annually. ZeroRisk gives payment providers a single view of risk across their entire merchant portfolio and gives merchants a clear path to action. The traction speaks for itself: Bank of America, Fiserv, Global Payments, Checkout.com and Trust Payments are already deploying the platform, with revenue expected to triple in 2026 as programmes move from contracted to live. This round led by MiddleGame Ventures, with continued support from Elkstone will fund global expansion and deepen the platform's capabilities. ZeroRisk’s commercial progress in a short period of time has been impressive, and this Series A funding round further validates investor confidence that Zero Risk can deliver transformational change in the sector globally. Congratulations to Gary Nolan and the entire ZeroRisk team. Niall McEvoy Dara O'Shea Barry Brennan Sarah Bogossian #Marketing

Ireland's funding gap for scaling companies is now €1.1 billion and closing it is fast becoming a matter of economic security, not economic ambition. That was the clear message from last week's Scale Ireland Autumn Gathering, where founders, investors and the Tánaiste Simon Harris sat down to confront an uncomfortable truth: our fastest-growing indigenous companies are being held back by a lack of capital, not a lack of ambition. A few numbers worth calling out: → €1.1bn: the funding gap facing scaling Irish companies over the next 3–5 years (and Scale Ireland's chair believes that's conservative) → 2% vs 0.02%: the share of pension fund assets allocated to venture capital in the US vs Europe → €1.6bn: already committed by ISIF across 500+ Irish companies, with over €250m now flowing back The opportunity here isn't just about plugging a gap. It's about building a deeper, more diversified base of capital pension funds, family offices, institutional investors willing to back Irish companies earlier and stay the course longer. Patient capital builds resilient economies. The companies scaling today are Ireland's Tech Unicorns of tomorrow. You can play a part in closing this gap directly with Elkstone Venture Fund II backing promising early-stage Irish companies with the patient, engaged capital needed to scale globally. https://lnkd.in/eAD5Sqyw #Venturecapital #Ireland #Marketing Joe Bergin Niall McEvoy

Our first investment out of Elkstone Venture Fund II is live and it's tackling a problem most people don't talk about: healthcare's clinical judgement bottleneck. Wearables, home test kits, health apps, we've never had more health data available. But someone still has to interpret it safely. That's the part that hasn't scaled. We're delighted to have led a €3 million round in Full Health Medical, the Irish healthtech company solving exactly this problem. Founded by Dr. Ann Shortt and Paul Mc Carthy and led by an experienced repeat tech founder team - Dermot Shortt and Rizwan Saeed, their platform lets a single clinician review and deliver results to hundreds of patients a day without cutting corners on governance. Every output is fully auditable. Every decision is clinically owned. That combination of scale and rigour is rare, and it's why 500,000+ medicals have already been processed through their platform, with clients including MedMark across the UK and Ireland. Elkstone led this round alongside Enterprise Ireland and angel investors to support the team's ambition to build a category-defining global platform. #Healthtech #VentureCapital #Ireland Joe Bergin Niall McEvoy Alan Merriman Cillian Sugrue

The browser is quietly becoming the most powerful games console on the planet. For years, "instant play" has been the holy grail gaming has chased and never quite reached. Storage limits, platform lock-in, endless friction all of it costing the industry players. That friction is about to disappear. We're proud to have backed Entity's €5M seed round a new Irish gaming startup building what they call a "games console powered by the Web." No downloads. No installs. Click a link, and you're playing a console-quality game in seconds, on any modern browser, on any device. “Entity is exactly the kind of ambitious, technically credible company Elkstone invests in: an Irish team with a genuine track record of global exits, tackling a real shift in how an entire industry will build and distribute its product. The browser is fast becoming the most powerful games platform in the world, and Entity is positioning itself right at the center of that shift. We’re proud to co-lead this round and back Rich and the team as they build Ireland’s next global gaming success story.” Sarah Bogossian, Venture Partner, Elkstone It's made possible by genuine technical breakthroughs: WebGPU and WebAssembly finally give the browser the horsepower to run AAA-grade experiences. But what convinced us wasn't just the tech. It was the team. Entity is founded by Rich Barnwell, Kevin Bergin, David McGovern, Fergus Duggan and Artur Stawiarski, the team behind DIGIT, the studio that built Star Trek Fleet Command before its acquisition by Scopely in 2019. They're joined by Head of Games Paul Farley, whose track record spans Firestoke, Tag Games (acquired by Scopely) and Chili Connect (acquired by Unity). This is a team that has built billion-dollar franchises and knows exactly what developers and players need next. Elkstone is investing alongside ACT and Delta Partners, with support from Enterprise Ireland and a strong group of games industry angels. A signal of just how much conviction there is behind this shift. As founder Rich Barnwell put it: "The way games are made, discovered, and played is fundamentally changing, and these games will need a new home." Entity launches in 2027 with a lineup spanning global bestsellers and original new IP. #VentureCapital #GamingIndustry #Web3Gaming #IrishStartups #SeedFunding Joe Bergin Niall McEvoy Sarah Bogossian Jeremy Debono

Irish VC just had its strongest quarter in years and there's a clear story behind the numbers. $342.2m across 20 deals in Q2. Up 61% on Q1. Up over 150% year-on-year according to KPMG Ireland’s latest Venture Pulse Report. That's a strong sign for Ireland's venture ecosystem. Irish scale-up companies are attracting significant international capital after being funded through early stage growth by the domestic investment ecosystem. Alongside those large, later-stage raises, there's a healthy tail of AI-native start-ups securing smaller seed rounds as they build out niche verticals. Together, that's a strong pattern: proof points at the top of the market, and a pipeline building underneath it. Take Elkstone portfolio company Manna Air Delivery. Bobby Healy's drone delivery company raised $50m from a consortium including Elkstone, ISIF, Schooner Capital and ARK Investment Management LLC that's fueling its expansion into the US, where drone delivery has a clearer regulatory runway and a much larger addressable market. It's a strong signal that Irish-founded companies can build globally relevant technology and back it with serious international capital to scale well beyond home turf. Ireland is riding a genuine global AI wave, annual VC investment worldwide is already at a five-year high. The real opportunity now is building on this momentum so more Irish companies can follow that same path to global scale. Elkstone Venture Fund II provides investors with unique access to a diversified portfolio of the very best of Irish start ups. #Marketing #Investing #StartupIreland #VentureCapital

Manufacturing's biggest bottleneck isn't the machines. It's the data trapped between them and WrxFlo just raised €3 million to fix it. Most plants and warehouses are still running on disconnected systems and spreadsheets, which means teams spend more time chasing information than acting on it. At Elkstone, we're proud to have led a €3 million investment in WrxFlo, the Limerick-founded company whose AI platform gives manufacturers and logistics operators one connected view of their operations, plus an AI co-worker to cut waste and flag risk before it hits the line. The investment comes on the back of strong commercial momentum: WrxFlo has more than doubled its ARR and now supports manufacturing and logistics operations across five global markets, including Ireland, the UK, Germany, China and the USA. For clients, that's translated into real results up to 40% lower operational costs and a 25% lift in productivity across production lines. Founded by ex-Dell manufacturing leaders Tim Crowe, Ken Sheehan and Jennifer Kelly, WrxFlo is backed by Elkstone alongside Furthr VC and Enterprise Ireland, with a target of growing from 60 to 200 employees by 2028. This is exactly the kind of company Irish venture capital should be backing: deep sector experience, a real operational problem, and global ambition from day one. Congratulations to Tim, Ken, Jennifer and the whole WrxFlo team. Read more: https://lnkd.in/dADR-Fix Jeremy Debono Niall McEvoy Richard Watson #Marketing