Specialist software company Nomos secures €500,000 in venture capital

Two former Motorola employees have received €500,000 in venture capital funding for their specialist software company, Nomos.

Tricia Balfe and David Garry founded the company in 2007 with their redundancy payments from Motorola. Nomos’s software has been developed to assist financial companies with writing and testing software for accurately delivering banking products and satisfying regulatory requirements.

Cork-based venture capital firm Kernel Capital, with €196m under management, is investing €500,000 into the company, supported by Enterprise Ireland.

There are two people working in the company, but with the investment they are planning to increase the number of employees to 10 by 2013. Ms Balfe said that they were currently hiring and that it was just a matter of finding the correct people.

Chief executive of Nomos Tricia Balfe said investment from Kernel Capital means an end to five years of “bootstrapping” the firm.

“This investment is a very significant milestone,” she said. “We intend to recruit highly qualified technical and sales professionals to enable us to further strengthen our core offering and to develop the business with our international partners and customers.”

The niche area of testing is a considerable cost for financial institutions accounting for up to 40% of overall development costs. Nomos products can significantly reduce the testing costs. Nomos has already licensed software which is distributed by No Magic.

Kernel’s chief technology adviser, Dr Daniel McCaughan, said Nomos has potential for strong international growth.

“Nomos is an excellent start-up, developing software to assist the financial sector in the difficult tasks of writing and testing software for accurately delivering banking products and satisfying regulatory requirements,” said Dr McCaughan.

“Kernel Capital is delighted to support Irish companies like Nomos which are poised for international growth in financial services, telecoms and aerospace.”

Current Nomos customers include major European and international players in the financial sector. The company’s Finnish customer, XMLdation, delivers test services to corporate treasuries on behalf of a number of European banks, driving down corporate IT costs as they migrate to the new European-wide payments system, the Single European Payments Area.

To help the company achieve its growth targets, Dr Chris Horn, the former CEO of IONA Technologies, has been appointed a non-executive director.