From left: Charles Dowd and Clive Foley, co-founders of Plynk. Image: Plynk
After raising one of the largest Series A rounds in Irish tech start-up history, Plynk may have reached the end of the road.
Irish payments company Plynk has scheduled a creditors’ meeting to seek the appointment of a liquidator for the firm.
Plynk last year made headlines for raising €25m in what has to be one of the largest Series A rounds in Irish tech industry history.
The investment was funded by a company called Swiss Privée Ltd. Both Enterprise Ireland and NDRC are shareholders in the start-up.
In October, Plynk revealed plans to create 40 new jobs.
All seemed to be going swimmingly until a number of months ago when reports surfaced of the company experiencing a crunch in funding as well as staff leaving.
The risks that all start-ups run
Plynk’s platform was designed to enable users to send each other money as a message linked to their Facebook accounts.
But payments is becoming an increasingly crowded space with players such as Square, Circle and Stripe leading the charge while both Apple and Facebook are also understood planning their own peer-to-peer payments platforms.
According to reports in both the Irish Independent and The Irish Times, Plynk has scheduled a creditors’ meeting to seek the appointment of Jim Stafford of Friel Stafford as liquidator.
The meeting is scheduled for 27 June.
Plynk was co-founded by ex-Facebook executive Charles Dowd and ex-Wonga executive Clive Foley.
Foley is understood to have since left Plynk to take up a role as chief technical architect at LiveTiles.
The development is a reminder that all start-up ventures are risk-based and, even if start-ups raise large rounds of finance, the road to success is full of unexpected turns.
