Inside Ireland's big pitch to reel in the AI innovators

This article originally appeared in The Sunday Times, by Linda Daly, and was published on 17 October 2026. Read the original.

As the government's international AI summit got under way last Wednesday, public service workers and AI sceptics demonstrated outside the RDS. Inside, the organisers almost had another protest on their hands when up to 30 delegates were refused entry to the main hall.

Micheál Martin, the taoiseach, was preparing to deliver the opening address before giving way to speakers including Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate. The room was full, a beleaguered security guard informed those waiting outside. The standoff ended amicably before the end of the opening performance, which involved Irish dancing, drumming and a medley of songs including Eimear Lynch's The Voice and U2's Beautiful Day.

The summit, a flagship event in Ireland's six-month presidency of the council of the European Union, was the government's attempt to put Ireland on the international map for artificial intelligence, to reel in the big innovators.

"AI will be one of the defining opportunities of our time, and Ireland will continue to work hand-in-hand with our European partners to ensure we seize it," Martin said in his opening address.

Two of the world's most prominent companies in the field, Anthropic and OpenAI, already have offices in Dublin and are looking to expand.

Fin, a homegrown tech company formerly known as Intercom, was sold for $3.6bn to Salesforce in June after pivoting to AI, and the Collison brothers' fintech Stripe has gone big on the technology in recent years.

Last week Tines, founded by Eoin Hinchy and Thomas Kinsella, announced the creation of 100 jobs, in a range of roles from engineering to sales. Set up in 2018, Tines, which provides workflow automation to companies, rebuilt its model using AI. It reached so-called unicorn status in May after a $125m fundraising round, led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, valued the company at more than $1.1bn.

"Ireland isn't just a country that could or can produce companies building global AI businesses — we're already doing it," Hinchy told The Sunday Times.

The problem, as some commentators see it, is a lack of available capital in Ireland and the rest of Europe. A European Investment Bank report in 2024 said that by the time European companies reached ten years in operation, they had raised 50 per cent less capital than their San Francisco counterparts.

Last year, the European Commission reported that Europe's investment in AI was a fraction of that in the US. European AI companies attracted $8bn in venture capital in 2023, compared with $68bn in the US and $15bn in China.

Brian Caulfield, a venture capitalist and start-up investor, said the main challenge for Ireland and Europe was "access to capital to build AI companies".

OpenAI, a San Francisco-based company, and Paris-headquartered Mistral are two contrasting examples. OpenAI has raised $180bn while Mistral has raised $7.5bn to date.

"It's not that Europe doesn't have the money," Caulfield said. "It's that Europe doesn't really have an investing culture.

"For example, if you look at the main sources of [passive investment] in venture capital funds in the US, anything up to 50 per cent comes from public pension funds. Up to a further 30 per cent comes from the large university endowments. In Europe, we don't have the big university endowments. There isn't an Ireland teachers' retirement fund."

That lack of capital is driving companies out of Europe.

Mario Draghi's 2024 report on EU competitiveness said that, between 2008 and 2021, close to 30 per cent of business unicorns founded in Europe relocated their headquarters outside the bloc. The vast majority went to the US.

The EU is trying to stop the exodus. In August it launched a €5bn scale-up fund for companies that are raising from series B onwards.

"Funding rounds are smaller in Europe so there is less money to start with and the growth funds themselves are smaller in comparison to the US, but my hope is that more funding will be provided for pre-series A funding," said Dorothy Creaven, co-founder of Jentic, an AI infrastructure start-up.

Jentic conducted one of the biggest pre-seed funding rounds yet in Ireland in late 2024 when it raised €4m. It has since raised another €2m.

According to a report published by Enterprise Ireland using PitchBook data, since the start of last year Irish AI companies have raised just under €950m across 182 deals. Among them were Fonoa (€94.1m), Wayflyer (€161.8m) and Tines (€120.7m).

Creaven, who spoke as part of a panel at the AI summit, proposed an ambition of building 20 Irish-headquartered unicorns by 2036. It is doable, she said, pointing to the EU's own ambition of increasing the number of tech unicorns in Europe from 324 in 2023 to 500 by 2030.

Around the summit, the government announced a series of initiatives to improve Ireland's chances of catching the AI wave. These include AIready.ie, which is aimed at upskilling people in the technology, and Rinn AI, a national research and innovation centre for AI and data science, which was launched in July. It also plans on allocating €100m of a €1bn investment initiative with the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund to venture capital, with a focus on AI and life sciences.

On Tuesday last week, the cabinet gave approval for Startup Ireland, a new Enterprise Ireland scheme that will include a €21m AI accelerator, which will connect AI-native start-ups with established Irish companies and multinationals.

The three-year accelerator will offer €100,000 cheques on the way in and a pathway to further high-potential start-up funding, which involves a co-investment from Enterprise Ireland of €250,000-plus. The aim is to have more founders start and scale their businesses in Ireland.

Creaven said she would like to see the government go a step further and launch something similar to Je Choisis la French Tech [I Choose French Tech], a French-government backed initiative that aims to encourage larger companies to do business with start-ups. Since the scheme's launch three years ago, French start-ups have secured more than €2bn worth of contracts from 23 big companies.

Fergal O'Connor, chief executive of Buymedia, an AI-powered media planning company, would like the government to be more open to giving contracts to AI companies.

Buymedia was one of 50 companies exhibiting their wares at the AI summit. Enterprise Ireland and the Department of Enterprise invited a number of Irish SMEs to exhibit alongside bigger companies such as TikTok, Google and Bentley. Audience members could interact with an AI-operated robot, partake in Google's Gemini AI-virtual cycle tour, or check out Analog Devices' smart home solutions.

After coming through Enterprise Ireland's high-potential start-up programme, Buymedia recently moved into the UK, where the market is worth €55bn, and has plans to expand to the US to access a market that is worth about €600bn.

"I would have nothing but good to say from the government support perspective," O'Connor said. "I do think government procurement is anti-innovation because you have lots of really cool, credible, innovative companies that are coming through the Irish ecosystem, through the likes of Enterprise Ireland, and all they need is a break of a big customer to actually get them going. The government could be that customer."

At the summit on Wednesday, the government launched Intelligence:Applied, a new programme aimed at accelerating AI adoption across the economy including within the public sector.

It wants to increase the use of AI in the health system to support imaging and breast cancer screening. The government is launching a social protection innovation hub that will use generative AI to help users navigate the social welfare system. The Department of Agriculture, meanwhile, will use AI to introduce a national fire activity forecast. Startup Ireland will use AI to collate data on what start-ups want.

Michael Cronin, co-founder and managing director at OpenSky Data Systems, said his company had been working with government agencies to help them deploy enterprise AI safely and at scale. At the summit, it launched a new end-to-end service that will help public bodies move experimental AI into everyday workflows, while complying with various regulations such as the EU AI Act.

"Some public sector agencies are nervous about the adoption of AI but what OpenSky can do is help them design and build the system and take it live safely and at scale," Cronin said. "They'll be able to stand over their AI in front of an Oireachtas committee."

Fear of failure may be holding public sector agencies and other companies back from implementing AI into their business practices. One audience member was also overheard lamenting that the AI giants themselves seemed to have been "selling fear", as companies such as Anthropic warn that there are "existential AI risks to humanity".

OpenAI published research last week that showed Ireland had the seventh lowest rate of adoption of AI agents in Europe. At the summit, Sarah Friar, its Tyrone-born chief financial officer, played the role of encouraging primary school teacher.

"Ireland is definitely on the up … Keep doing whatever you are doing around here but just do it a little faster probably," Friar said.

Eamonn Grant, founder of RunCommerce, a company that is automating the manual tasks that ecommerce businesses have to carry out — such as image and video generation — agreed with Friar: Ireland and Europe should adopt AI more quickly.

"Something that we're not doing very well is moving at pace," Grant said. "We're slow at supporting businesses. [Our governments] are not set up for AI-first businesses. So something like the AI accelerator, which was announced by Enterprise Ireland, is great."

Michael Cronin pointed out that AI reached into all sorts of businesses, not just the AI-native ones.

Speaking at the Enterprise Ireland event on Tuesday, Eddie Wilson, chief executive of Ryanair DAC, said: "AI fell out of the ceiling and suddenly we had an accelerant to make workflows better." The airline is using AI across its customer services, employee management and flight operations.

Nora Khaldi spoke at the summit about how Nuritas, the Irish company she set up, used AI to discover peptides in nature that could improve human health. Khaldi said by using AI, the company took six months to come up with a combination for three peptides, in a process that otherwise could have taken millions of years.

The use of AI within existing sectors, according to Brad Smith, vice-chair and president at Microsoft, is Ireland and Europe's real opportunity.

"What is great about Europe … is [there are] so many industries where Europe is a leader, so many areas where Europe has deep domain expertise," Smith said. "Every one of these industries will be transformed by AI. Every one of these advances creates a new opportunity to accelerate innovation, drive productivity growth and support economic growth. All of this is part of Europe's future. And all of it creates opportunities for start-ups across Europe."