Show Notes
GEC 25 Year Impact Report: https://www.gec.ie/impact-report Niamh Collins has spent more than 15 years inside Ireland's startup ecosystem, and for the last three she has run the Guinness Enterprise Centre — one of Ireland's first enterprise hubs and now one of its largest, home to over 160 companies across five floors of a former Guinness hop store in the Liberties. Her vantage point is the connective tissue of the ecosystem: the introductions, signposting and supports that turn a founder with an idea into a company selling into the US, the UK and Europe. In this conversation, we get into: What "managed serendipity" looks like in practice — how one founder's presentation to a visiting Tampa Bay delegation turned into a new customer, a research partner and a US investor introduction
The supports most Irish founders don't know exist — monthly Local Enterprise Office clinics, Mentoring for Scale, and soft-landing agreements with hubs in the UK, US and Europe
What 25 years of the GEC adds up to — 1,300+ companies through the doors, and approximately €140M in turnover and €73M+ in exports from GEC companies last year alone
What "graduating" really means — Urban Fox's €8M raise, Mobility Mojo's €4.2M, and why the GEC doesn't say goodbye, just "see you for a while"
The role of the Irish diaspora — mentoring, investing, opening doors, and Niamh's open invitation to the Digital Irish community
If you're an Irish founder — or part of the diaspora wondering how to help from abroad — this episode is a map of the ecosystem behind Ireland's startup success.
Niamh Collins has served as Centre Director of the Guinness Enterprise Centre since 2023. She brings over 15 years’ experience within Ireland’s startup ecosystem, with a strong track record of supporting early-stage companies to grow and scale through incubation, acceleration, and tailored business support programmes. Prior to joining the GEC, she was Director of the NovaUCD AgTech Innovation Centre and previously held the role of Chief Operating Officer at the DCU Ryan Academy. The Guinness Enterprise Centre is Ireland’s largest enterprise campus, located in Dublin 8, and is home to 160 companies ranging from individual founders to established scaling teams. These companies operate across a diverse range of sectors, including digital health, medtech, technology, sustainability, aviation, professional services. The Centre provides a combination of co-working and private office space, alongside a comprehensive suite of business supports, programmes, and advisory clinics designed to enable growth, innovation, and international expansion. Want to get in contact with the Digital Irish team? Email us at [email protected]
More from Digital Irish Podcast
Bernard McCaul has spent almost twenty years inside GOAL, the Irish humanitarian agency founded nearly fifty years ago when sports journalist John O'Shea came home from Kolkata and decided to act. Bernard has been on the ground for the Asian tsunami, the Haiti earthquake, and the West Africa Ebola outbreak, and he is now part of the team growing GOAL's presence in the US. That vantage point — twenty years at the sharp end of the world's worst crises — makes this a conversation about how humanitarian aid actually works, not how people assume it works.In this conversation, we get into: Sierra Leone, 2014: what it takes to head for the epicenter of an Ebola outbreak while others are leaving — and how the Community-Led Action approach born there became a national tool that turned Sierra Leone into a leader in outbreak response. The AI chatbots GOAL built with Sierra Leone's Ministry of Health during the recent mpox outbreak — sharing official information with at-risk communities and feeding live data back to responders — now being deployed to the Ebola response in Central Africa. Why crises happen when local systems collapse, and why aid delivered without understanding those systems can do more harm than good. What people get wrong about aid — including how the outbreak of war, not aid failure, set Sudan back thirty years. Bernard's case for hope: near-universal internet access is coming, and early warning systems protecting every person on the planet are genuinely achievable.
Fergal Mullen left Ireland at 18 on an athletics scholarship and has spent 25 years in venture — first inside a NASDAQ-listed consultancy, then at Highland Capital Partners in Boston, before spinning out its European arm in 2012 to co-found Highland Europe. The firm now manages close to €4 billion, sees around 3,000 companies a year, and invests in seven or eight. Very few people can tell founders what happens on the other side of the table with that much of a funnel behind them. In this conversation, we get into: What “coachable founder” actually means — and why the softest criterion on Highland Europe’s list is the one that decides.
Kieran Corbett has seen the Irish startup journey from every side of the table. He started out trading futures in Dublin, began writing angel checks into early-stage Irish companies in 2015, and has kept backing them since moving to New York in 2016 — where he now invests at Studio VC, a seed-stage fund whose portfolio includes Wayflyer. That vantage point — Irish angel, US-based VC, and brother of a Wayflyer co-founder — makes him unusually well placed to explain what actually happens on the investor's side of a pitch. In this conversation, we get into: What US VCs are actually underwriting for — and why “this could be worth millions” is the wrong answer in an American pitch meeting
Niall Dennehy's first bank account was opened in 1987, when his mother walked him ten metres from their front door to the credit union in Ballydesmond, Co. Cork — a branch named for Nora Herlihy, the local schoolteacher who helped found the Irish credit union movement. He still gets the statement every month. Nearly four decades on, having co-founded blockchain company AID:Tech and gone through Techstars, he's a father of four in Dublin building NestiFi: an AI-powered platform that lets whole families, wherever they've scattered, invest together in a child's future. In this conversation, we get into: The 1987 credit union account Niall still gets statements for, and how it became the blueprint for NestiFi
Dylan Scully is an early-stage investor at Frontline Ventures, a transatlantic venture fund investing in B2B tech and AI across Europe at pre-seed and seed, and in the US at Series B and beyond. Frontline’s thesis: to build a category-defining company, you need to win both Europe and the US; it’s not an either/or. In this conversation, Dylan draws on his background as a founder (Matchday) and his time at Accenture’s global innovation team to give data-backed, practical advice to Irish founders thinking about US expansion. We cover the “SaaSpocalypse” debate, what enterprise buyers actually value, the real cost of entering the US market, and what gets Frontline excited at the pitch table. Show Notes Frontline’s dual fund strategy — early stage across Europe, growth stage in the US, and why the transatlantic network matters