Celebrating a successful 2024 for start-ups worldwide, SiliconRepublic.com has highlighted 10 businesses that have made a splash this year.
Start-ups worldwide continue to lead the charts when it comes to innovation and technology, fostering healthy competition while generating billions in revenue and paving the way for more businesses to make their marks.
This year, much like every year, SiliconRepublic.com has covered dozens of stories of start-ups making waves in their respective fields – in Ireland and elsewhere.
Our coverage has shown the obvious – that the recent artificial intelligence (AI) boom continues to aid in the creation of innovation in several fields, despite some reports of slowdown in funding and investments in part due to some recent geo-political developments.
Some of the biggest start-up successes this year include the ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which reached a valuation of nearly $160bn this year, while the home-grown fintech start-up Stripe grew to more than $70bn and the UK-based Revolut – being valued at $45bn – became one of the most valuable private technology companies in Europe.
As 2024 comes to an end, we at SiliconRepublic.com have compiled a list of 10 start-ups that have had a successful year.
Grid Beyond
The Dublin-based smart energy solutions company followed a successful 2023 by raising €52m in a Series C financing round earlier this year with the aim of expanding its presence in the US and beyond.
Later in the year, the 14-year-old company was awarded $7.8m from the US Department of Energy to work on an R&D project focused on the reliability, scalability and cost-effectiveness of using its AI-powered renewable controls platform technology to autonomously provide advanced grid services.
Meanwhile, just last month, the company, along with Triodos Energy Transition Europe Fund committed a further €12.5m for the next phase of their joint venture GridBeyond Storage that seeks to roll out Behind The Metre battery energy storage systems across the UK and Ireland.
Wayve
The UK-based autonomous driving AI start-up founded in 2017 has seen a meteoric rise thanks to the unprecedented scale of the AI boom. This summer, Wayve raised more than $1bn in a single funding round which saw backing from chipmaker Nvidia and the software giant Microsoft.
According to the former UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, Wayve’s latest funding marked the biggest investment ever made in a UK-based AI company.
The company, which has built an end-to-end deep learning autonomous driving system for public roads, is now building AI foundation models for autonomy, which it describes as “GPT for driving”.
Equal1
The three-year-old UCD spinout specialising in quantum computing received the prestigious Institute of Physics award for its advancements in the field earlier this year at an event organised by The Economist.
And just months later, the company – which continues to make leaps and bounds in the field – announced yet another “major breakthrough” with the successful testing of the “world’s most complex and coldest” quantum controller chip, as well as demonstrating “world-leading” performance on its single and two qubit silicon array chips.
Meanwhile, the company also signed a deal with Nvidia this year to work together on quantum tech use cases, which will also see Equal1’s hybrid silicon classical quantum hardware and its UnityQ quantum system-on-chip combined with Nvidia’s CUDA-Q quantum software platform.
Basecamp Research
The UK-based start-up founded in 2019 develops AI models trained specifically on life sciences and biotechnology data with the aim of creating models that have better insights in the field than humans.
According to the company’s co-founder and CEO Glen Gowers, the company is building a “ChatGPT for nature”. Earlier this year, the company raised $60m in a funding round and entered into a multiyear collaboration with Dr David R Liu’s laboratory at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Tines
No stranger to positive lists, the Irish six-year-old no-code automation start-up continued to garner more achievements under its belt this year.
Earlier this year, the company raised $50m in an extended Series B funding round, which, according to the company, would help improve its product and help its wide range of clients.
Founded by Eoin Hinchy and Thomas Kinsella, Tines has been anticipated to become one of Europe’s next unicorns, featuring on previous SiliconRepublic.com lists on promising start-ups in Europe and leading cybersecurity start-ups.
Moreover, the company was ranked as the top Irish start-up by LinkedIn this year, while also making it on France Digitale’s Leading Europe Tech Scale-ups top four list.
IntegrityIQ
2024 was a successful year for the AI-driven ethics and compliance training platform as it grabbed the title of the first campus company to spin out of Trinity Business School.
Founded in 2022 by Dr Daniel Malan, IntegrityIQ assists companies by creating personalised ethics and compliance training programmes and providing automated and guided whistleblowing opportunities.
Last year, the company received €365,000 through Enterprise Ireland’s Commercialisation Fund to bring the platform to market, which the company is set to achieve this year.
Peri
Peri and its co-founder Heidi Davis made a splash by winning this year’s edition of the prestigious Enterprise Ireland High-Potential Start-Up Founder of the Year Award.
Peri is an AI-powered wearable device aimed at helping users understand and manage their perimenopausal symptoms. The device, worn under the breast, provides insights to guide women toward a personalised menopause management plan.
The two-year-old Irish company was also in attendance at the 2024 Web Summit in Lisbon last month along with 35 other start-ups representing the country as part of the event’s Irish Startup Network.
Suas Aerospace
Cork-based Suas Aerospace is breaking frontiers in the Irish aerospace industry – being set to launch the country’s first commercial rocket, Pathfinder, in partnership with the Dutch company T-minus Engineering next year.
The company said that Ireland’s west coast is an “ideal destination for commercial rocket launches” and that the Pathfinder launch will demonstrate the country’s geographical advantage for the European launch market – which primarily uses South America for rocket launches.
Earlier this year, the company launched a funding round to raise €5m for the development of a spaceport in the country, while last year, it received €4.9m under the Horizon Europe programme to develop interoperable rocket engine testing infrastructure.
Xocean
The climate tech company, which uses robots to collect ocean data, raised €30m in a Series B funding round led by Venturewave Capital, a year after the climate-tech company announced the creation of 300 new jobs, and opened a new marine robotics tech centre in Co Louth.
Moreover, Xocean reached the final round of the new ‘Innovation of the Year’ category at the Business and Finance Awards this year, while also making a repeat appearance on the annual LinkedIn ranking of Irish start-ups.
xWave
xWave Technologies, the Dublin-based health-tech start-up made headlines by securing the first-ever UK tender from the country’s National Health Service (NHS) this year. According to the company headquartered at NovaUCD, it will provide its proprietary clinical decision support software to the general practitioners in England’s north-east region, serving more than 3m people.
The company also simultaneously launched a campaign on the Spark Crowdfunding platform to fund its expansion plan, receiving more than €1.1m in investment – more than €250,000 of its original funding goal of €850,000.
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