Technology firm behind private search engine secures €1m funding

TECHNOLOGY firm Datahug has secured €1 million investment funding as the massively successful Dublin Web Summit draws to a close.

The founders of Skype, Bebo and Angry Birds were in Dublin over the last few days to attend the summit.

The Datahug investment is led by Bill McCabe’s Oyster Technology Investments and includes Ron Conway, a high-profile Silicon Valley super angel who was an early investor in companies such as Twitter, Google and PayPal.

Datahug is essentially a private search engine that allows people to quickly find out who in their organisation best knows the lead, company, partner or recruit with whom they are trying to connect. This reduces the need for cold calls and gets people in front of the right person faster, according to the company.

Speaking at the Dublin Web Summit, chief executive and co-founder of Datahug, Connor Murphy, said: “With this funding, Datahug will keep pushing to unlock and organise the hidden network of contacts that exists within every organisation. We believe that using Datahug we can unlock 1,100 unique connections per employee.

“To date, we have unlocked over four million relationships, removing the need for cold calling as our users benefit from introductions through contacts, thus accessing hundreds of leads and saving thousands of hours on data input and maintenance.”

Datahug won the Dublin Web Summit Spark of Genius Competition last year.

The company said winning gave them the ideal platform to introduce Datahug to a global audience.

“Over the last year Datahug’s user base has rapidly grown to hundreds of secure and private networks with clients across the management consulting, legal, insurance, banking, business development, technology and investment sectors.

“Users love that Datahug requires no data entry as it seamlessly recycles customer interaction data to unlock and rank relationships.”

Over the last two days 1,500 people attended the Dublin Web Summit.

Dublin Web Summit organiser, Paddy Cosgrave, said: “Events such as the DWS have put Ireland’s tech sector on the world stage and made investors in Silicon Valley and elsewhere sit up and take notice of what is happening in Ireland’s tech industry.”