Taoiseach Enda Kenny with Dogpatch Europe's entrepreneur-in-residence Noel Ruane in September
Ireland’s Jobs Minister Richard Bruton, TD, is set to make an announcement at the start-up hub Dogpatch Labs in Dublin this morning regarding start-ups. Bruton will be speaking from the start-up Connectedtrips, the online community for people to find and book yoga, meditation, healing, and nutrition experiences.
It was last September that the US venture capital player Polaris located its Dogpatch Labs Europe start-up hub on Barrow Street in Dublin. Dogpatch is next door to Google’s European headquarters and just around the corner from Facebook and Zynga’s respective European headquarters.
And just down the road is the start-up accelerator Startupbootcamp.
Dogpatch is being headed up by the IDA’s former man on the ground in Silicon Valley, Noel Ruane. Before joining Polaris, Ruane was founder and former CEO of Brandmail Solutions.
Back in April, the lab announced it had seen off six US$1m-plus investments.
Just weeks after moving into the Dublin Patch, start-up Profitero obtained a €750,000 investment in a financing round. Then, in February, the company went on to win IBM’s Global Smart Camp finals in San Francisco, California.
And, in January, Biz Stone, co-founder of microblogging site Twitter, Huddle’s Andy McLoughlin, and 500 Startups put another US$1m into Irish software start-up Intercom, a CRM tool for web businesses that features Google Analytics-like integration.
James Whelton, the 19-year-old co-founder of the CoderDojo movement, has also based himself at the Dublin hub. And the science start-up Scrazzl is also based there.
The photo-sharing site Instagram, which was acquired by Facebook in March for about US$1bn, started out at Dogpatch in San Francisco.
