5 former Start-up of the Week stars winning big

12 Aug 2015

The Start-up of the Week series has been running on Siliconrepublic.com for several years now, and we like to think we know how to pick ‘em. We’ve been proved right recently with major announcements coming from five previous Start-up of the Week stars.

DisplayNote Technologies

The Belfast tech company, which featured as a Start-up of the Week in November last year and was named as one of our start-ups to watch in 2015, recently inked a deal with NEC to have its screen-sharing technology installed on PCs that will be sold across Japan.

DisplayNote builds technologies that are designed to make it easier for people to present, share, connect and collaborate in real-time across large-format displays, desktop and mobile devices.

Its products are now available in 22 languages and distributed globally, with sales of almost 1m devices incorporating DisplayNote’s software products to date.

 

CurrencyFair.com

CurrencyFair featured as a Start-up of the Week on Siliconrepublic.com in November 2013. The Dublin-headquartered business – which we flagged as a start-up to watch in 2014 – created a peer-to-peer marketplace model for people to transfer money online, removing banks from the equation.

It started in 2010, and it recently raised €10m on the back of a successful period that saw it become the first platform to break the US$1bn barrier in money-matching transfers.

The raised capital will help expand the peer-to-peer currency transfer sector and “enhance and expand CurrencyFair’s existing currency corridors”.

 

Sedicii

Waterford-based Sedicii was recently named a Tech Pioneer 2015 by the World Economic Forum.

The company, which has developed technology that authenticates users without the need to transmit private information over the internet or to store that private information on servers, was a Start-up of the Week in February 2014.

The company’s co-founder, Rob Leslie, told Siliconrepublic.com last week that he envisages Sedicii becoming a “global privacy brand that consumers will know and trust”.

 

FeelsRight

FeelsRight, which recently announced the creation of 50 jobs in Dublin, featured as a Start-up of the Week in September last year, when it was known as Mission Possible.

The software-as-a-service company works on the basis of companies buying credit for their staff. That credit can then be spent on personal tasks – dog walking, errand running, etc. – that will be completed for the employee while he or she is at work, or can be spent on health and wellness services like massages, reflexology and acupuncture.

The new jobs will bring the number of FeelsRight service providers to 300 – one for every company signed up to the platform.

 

Von Bismark

TV commerce player Von Bismark featured as a Start-up of the Week way back in 2012, and has had quite an eventful time since then.

Last year, in a world first, the company secured a deal with Microsoft to build and publish a marketplace that allows retailers to sell their inventory to the 13m Xbox One users worldwide.

Established by serial entrepreneur Eoghan O’Sullivan from Cork, it has its headquarters in London and an office in Dublin.

The Microsoft Ventures backed company recently raised £201,000 on CrowdBnk to drive its newest e-commerce shopping experience, called The Mall, which will launch on Xbox One this autumn.

Read more Start-up of the Week stories here.

Main image via Shutterstock

Brigid O Gorman is a former sub-editor of Silicon Republic.

editorial@siliconrepublic.com