Value of National Digital Research Centre companies soars to €600m

Companies which have participated in the National Digital Research Centre’s accelerator programmes are now collectively worth €600m, and have attracted €250m in follow-on investment raised to date.

Supporting high-impact tech companies to scale up for the past decade, NDRC’s latest report shows that its participant startups attracted over €50m in follow-on funding during 2018, up 30% on 2017.

16 NDRC-backed businesses raised more than €500,000 in investment in 2018, while nine secured more than €1 million. Nuritas, a 2015 NDRC investee, was a particularly notable example following a €30 million EIB investment. This represents the first time that the European Investment Bank has invested in an Irish biotech company.

The total value of companies invested in by NDRC since its inception has risen by 25% to more than €600 million, crossing the half billion threshold for the first time.

The portfolio of companies invested in now stands at 286 following the running of four accelerator programmes in 2018.

With its pre-acceleration and other activities taken into account, NDRC has worked with more than 500 businesses through various programmes since its foundation. Beyond this, hundreds more businesses have benefitted from NDRC’s assistance as they sought their own Best Place to Start.

Ben Hurley, NDRC’s CEO, said: “NDRC’s pursuit of building a sustainable pipeline of high quality, high potential startups showed ever greater signs of success during 2018, with strong growth in follow-on investment through the likes of Nuritas, Artomatix, EnteraSense, Pharmapod and Cortechs, alongside the exit of iCabbi, adding to impressive results across the board.

During 2018 we recognised our first Decade of Investing with a series of events with our stakeholders and alumni of companies, allowing us to reflect on what has been a fruitful intervention into the startup ecosystem. However, our work is not done.

“While Ireland is approaching full employment, the international trading environment is less than certain. Now is not the time to be complacent about the future prospects of our economy. As a state we need to support entrepreneurial activity and ensure our startup environment meets the standards set by our competitors. Building high value globally focussed scalable companies remains as important as ever. NDRC is looking forward to that challenge.”