David O'Flanagan, co-founder and CEO, Boxever
The latest start-up to feature in our One to Watch series is Boxever, a new cloud-based venture that has just raised €800,000 in an investing round. The company has developed a platform that allows airlines and travel companies to capture and analyse customer data in real-time.
David O’Flanagan, Alan Giles and Dermot O’Connor co-founded Boxever last year.
“We had all worked together at a travel technology company here in Dublin where we built and delivered multi-million-dollar e-commerce solutions to some of the largest airlines in world. What we saw was the relatively few had good analytics and insight – particularly in the online channel,” explains O’Flanagan, now CEO at Boxever.
“We felt that they really were a long way behind other online retail verticals. We started Boxever to fix this problem,” he adds.
Using big data
With its insight into the travel e-commerce industry, O’Flanagan says Boxever is aiming to help this sector use big data and customer intelligence to improve how it sells products online.
Boxever has already secured its first contract with the Nordic-based Atlantic Airways and is set to sign up two more customers by the end of the year.
“We’re a software-as-a-service solution designed specifically for the travel industry, which means there are no long, expensive hardware and software procurement cycles, no consultants and no customisation – just a monthly fee,” he adds.
Boxever took part in the LaunchPad programme at the NDRC last year. It is now based at Dogpatch Labs on Barrow Street. The company currently employs six people, including one employee who is based in Norway.
Last week, Boxever also got a welcome boost when it secured €800,000 in funding from a syndicate of investors. Delta Partners, together with Bloom Equity and Enterprise Ireland, led the funding round in Boxever.
O’Flanagan says the company will now aim to create 22 new jobs in the next three years. The jobs, he says, will be focused around sales and marketing and in increasing the team’s R&D headcount.
Check out our interview with David O’Flanagan here.
HBAN is an all-island umbrella organisation which promotes business angel investment, and creates business angel syndicates, to enable investment in innovative companies like Boxever. “We are in the process of establishing two more syndicates in the mobile and med-tech sectors, and we’d encourage anyone interested in becoming a business angel in one of these new syndicates to get in touch,” says Michael Culligan, national director at HBAN. For further information, go to the HBAN website.
The One to Watch series is made possible through the support of NDRC, HBAN and Enterprise Ireland
