John Whelan: How Ireland can retain the tech giants of the future
Protex AI co-founders, Ciarán O'Mara and Dan Hobbes; their company has relocated leadership to Boston to accelerate its US market.
The European Commission has just published the first-ever European Startup and Scaleup Scoreboard, a landmark exercise in measurement that benchmarks the startup and scaleup ecosystems of all 27 EU member states.
Ireland ranks a creditable seventh but loses out when it comes to financing rapidly growing startups, who need extra finances to expand internationally.
As a result, many of our most promising companies are compelled to relocate outside the EU.
The report acknowledges that innovative startups struggle to scale into global tech giants within Europe’s fragmented borders and most often exit their operations to the US.
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The US remained the largest single target market, with 16% of EU startups moving to the US in 2025. And the trend looks set to continue as a third of the 60 European founders surveyed in the first quarter of 2026 were actively considering relocating to the US.
Other countries such as Saudi Arabia, India, the UAE, Singapore, Australia, and Japan have also attracted a large share of outbound European tech FDI.
Irish startups, according to the ‘Startup Scoreboard’, are twice as likely to scale up their business by seeking funds from investors outside the EU.
Some recent examples include Nory, Tines, and Protex AI, to name but a few.
Nory, an AI-powered restaurant management platform, is a typical Irish example, which in September 2025, announced its expansion into the US market and the establishment of its New York HQ, following a $37m (€34m) US funding round led by venture capitalist Kinnevik with participation from other US venture funders Accel, Base10, and Triple Point.
The Irish entrepreneur and Mad Egg founder Conor Sheridan had raised capital initially based in Europe, including €14.7m in May 2024, but had to go to the US for the necessary follow-on funding to enable full market development.
Tines, the Dublin-based cybersecurity unicorn that secured a $125m fund backed by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs, alongside other US-based investors, also had to turn to US investors to continue its growth.
And Protex AI, the workplace safety analytics provider, raised multi-million-dollar funding rounds and has relocated leadership to Boston to accelerate its US market.
The scale of the problem is continuing to mount, as reported by the Irish Venture Capital Association, which indicated that venture capital investment into Irish tech SMEs in Q1 2026 fell by 58% to €221.7m, compared to €533m in the same period in 2025.
Further evidence of the challenge for startups came from the ESRI reporting last week that their latest research found that nearly two decades after the global financial crisis, Irish SMEs continue to face significant challenges in accessing finance, with high borrowing costs and limited banking competition suppressing demand for credit.
Europe does have a growth capital gap, and fixing it should be a policy priority.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin will be faced with challenges on how to rectify this during Ireland’s EU presidency over the next six months.
Balancing the continent’s lack of enough domestic investors capable of consistently supporting the very largest growth funding rounds, with the need to attract much-needed external investment, will not be an easy task.
But statements such as that by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which in recent days warned that European regulations are ‘hurting’ international investors and preventing them from putting more money into the region, dangling a €10.4bn investment opportunity if things are improved, may help to overcome some reluctant EU members.
Pushing through an agreement for the rollout of the capital markets union (CMU) would be a good start.
Critical to the success of the CMU will be creating the right incentives for pension funds, institutional investors, and private capital to allocate more towards the scaling companies and by rewarding long-term investment by individuals through schemes, which could be done through the muted SIA scheme, which, in Ireland’s case, could release the €170bn sitting in bank deposit accounts.
Europe’s operating environment has substantially worsened in the past year.
Without a sense of urgency by member states policymakers, Europe and Ireland will continue producing world-class companies while outsourcing too much of their scale-up and value creation to foreign capital.
