Ireland’s AI Startups 2026: Inside the Companies Powering the Next Wave
Ireland’s AI Companies 2026: The Startups Actually Building AI, Not Just Renting Dublin Office Space
Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Meta all picked Dublin as their European base — but none of them build their AI here. These are the Irish-founded companies actually creating it: two homegrown unicorns, a drone delivery fleet, and a handful of well-funded startups most readers have never heard of.
How this piece was built: funding figures, valuations, and founding details below are sourced from public funding-tracker databases, press coverage, and company statements, linked throughout. Where a figure comes from a single source rather than multiple confirmations, that’s noted. Last reviewed June 2026.
Two Different Stories Under One Headline
We recently covered why Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Meta all base their European operations in Dublin — but that’s a story about where these companies file paperwork and answer to regulators, not where they build anything. Their AI research happens in San Francisco, London, Mountain View. Dublin gets the office, not the lab.
That’s a genuinely different story from Ireland’s own AI sector — smaller, less famous, but actually building product here. This piece is about that second group: the companies founded in Ireland, building AI in Ireland, employing people in Ireland.
The Two Homegrown Unicorns
Tines
Founded by Eoin Hinchy as an AI-powered workflow automation platform for security teams, Tines is Ireland’s most recent unicorn. It raised a $125 million Series C in February 2025, valuing the company at $1.125 billion, and said at the time it was performing over a billion automated actions for customers every week. What started as a security-specific tool has since expanded into infrastructure, engineering, and product workflows more broadly.
Wayflyer
Founded by Jack Pierse and Aidan Corbett, Wayflyer provides revenue-based financing for e-commerce brands, using machine learning models to assess and underwrite funding decisions — it underwrites more than 30,000 e-commerce brands and launched a dedicated AI-Inventory Predictor in 2025 that uses machine learning to forecast merchant inventory needs. It reached unicorn status in February 2022 after a $150 million Series B led by DST Global, valuing the company at $1.6 billion. By late 2025, the company had raised a cumulative $1.9 billion in capital.
The Well-Funded Next Tier
Below the two unicorns is a group of smaller, genuinely interesting Irish AI companies — some well-funded, some early-stage, all worth knowing about before they become the next headline.
Manna
Founded and led by Bobby Healy, Manna had completed more than 150,000 drone deliveries and raised $60 million in total funding as of its most recent $30 million round, led by existing investors Molten Ventures and Tapestry VC, with backing from Enterprise Ireland and Coca-Cola HBC among others. The company is expanding both within Ireland and into the Nordics.
Protex AI
An AI-driven computer vision company building what it describes as an intelligent operating system for industrial facility safety, Protex AI secured a $36 million Series B and counts DHL, Amazon, and Tesla among its customers, operating in more than 20 countries. The company has raised $54.46 million in total funding since its founding.
Oraion
Founded by Alexander Walsh, Oraion builds an agentic AI platform that lets users “chat” with enterprise data, raising $3.5 million in a pre-seed round led by New York-based Studio VC, with backing from notable angels including Wayflyer co-founder Aidan Corbett and Indeed co-founder Paul Forster. The company is preparing to expand into the US and Latin America.
Mirror Security
Founded by Pankaj Thapa and Dr Aditya Narayana K as a spin-out from University College Dublin, Mirror Security builds Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology that lets AI systems process sensitive data while it stays fully encrypted, rather than exposing it during training or inference. The company raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding led by Sure Valley Ventures and Atlantic Bridge in December 2025, and its founders hold 23 patents in cryptography and AI security between them. It’s a genuinely distinctive angle in a crowded AI security space — most competitors secure access to data; Mirror is trying to make the data itself unreadable even to the AI processing it.
Numra
Founded by David Kearney and Conor Digan, Numra’s AI assistant manages collections, invoice processing, reconciliations, and cost allocation for finance teams, raising €1.5 million led by Elkstone — the same investor behind earlier Irish successes like Flipdish and LetsGetChecked.
The Infrastructure Behind the Scene
One organization worth knowing about even though it’s not a startup: CeADAR, Ireland’s Centre for Applied AI, headquartered at NexusUCD and funded by Enterprise Ireland and the IDA, has more than 90 member companies and operates as one of the EU’s Digital Innovation Hubs focused on delivering applied AI research to industry (ceadar.ie). It’s effectively the connective tissue a lot of these smaller companies rely on for research collaboration and talent.
The Funding Picture, Honestly
Irish startups overall raised €992 million across 319 companies in 2025, with annual fundraising settling around the €900 million to €1 billion mark since the highs of 2021. That’s not AI-specific funding — it spans all sectors — but it gives useful context for how the AI-focused raises above fit into the wider picture.
The more cautionary number: Irish technology SMEs raised €221.7 million in venture capital in Q1 2026, a 58% fall compared to the same period the previous year, though that decline is partly explained by an unusually strong Q1 2025 comparison. The report also notes an ongoing challenge for Irish startups scaling from early seed funding into Series A and beyond, where momentum continues to lag — worth knowing if you’re tempted to read this list as evidence of unstoppable momentum.
What we left out, deliberately: search results for “best Irish AI companies” are dominated by pay-to-list directory sites that mix in generic web development agencies with a token “AI consulting” line item. We excluded those — every company above either has a confirmed funding round, a named founder, or both.
My Take — Mr Wangdoo
The contrast with our last piece is the actual story here. Anthropic and OpenAI chose Dublin because of where the EU’s regulatory machinery sits — a real, sensible business decision, but one that has very little to do with Ireland’s own capacity to build AI. Tines and Wayflyer are the opposite case: companies that started here, built something genuinely useful, and earned billion-dollar valuations without needing a multinational’s balance sheet to get there.
The honest caveat is scale. Two unicorns and a handful of well-funded startups is a real achievement for a country Ireland’s size, but it’s nowhere near the gravitational pull of the multinational AI labs now headquartered a few miles away. Whether Ireland’s homegrown AI sector grows alongside that multinational presence, or just becomes a talent pipeline that feeds it, is the more interesting question — and not one this list can answer on its own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Ireland have any AI unicorns?
Two with strong AI components: Tines (security workflow automation, $1.12B valuation) and Wayflyer (AI-driven e-commerce financing, $1.6B valuation). Ireland has 10 unicorns total across all sectors, but most aren’t AI-focused.
Is Anthropic or OpenAI an “Irish AI company”?
No. Both have chosen Dublin as their European headquarters for regulatory and operational reasons, but they’re US-founded companies building their core AI research elsewhere. This list covers companies actually founded in Ireland.
Is Irish AI startup funding growing or shrinking?
Mixed picture. Overall Irish startup funding held roughly flat in 2025 at €992 million, but AI-specific venture capital in Q1 2026 fell 58% year-on-year, partly due to an unusually strong comparison period in Q1 2025.
Sources
- “More than 10 European startups became unicorns this year” — TechCrunch
- “Unicorn startups in Ireland” — Tracxn
- Wayflyer — Wikipedia
- “Best AI Startups in Dublin” — Seedtable
- “The Week In Irish Startups” (Newsletter 120) — Ed O’Riordan
- “The Week In Irish Startups” — Ed O’Riordan
- “Dublin’s Mirror Security raises $2.5m for AI encryption tech” — Silicon Republic
- “Mirror Security raises $2.5m to secure AI” — ThinkBusiness
- “Ireland’s hottest start-ups to watch in 2026” — ThinkBusiness
- “Irish AI, machine learning and robotics start-ups to watch” — ThinkBusiness
- “Irish Startup Funding was €992M in 2025” — Irish Tech News / TechIreland
