Richard Watson

The IVCA is the representative organisation for venture capital and private equity firms on the island of Ireland. Last year, VC investment into Irish tech start-ups and SMEs, which totalled €1.1 billion, fell for the first time since 2018.

Commenting on this decline and pointing to the fact that 85 per cent of funding into Irish tech SMEs came from overseas VC investors in the first quarter of this year the new IVCA chair said: “We have become overly reliant on overseas investors to fuel the development of our indigenous knowledge-based economy. This is particularly worrying in a world which has become increasingly isolationist while at the same time vast amounts of international venture capital are being channelled into large-scale artificial intelligence deals, particularly in the United States.”

Mr Watson added: “We have an abundance of super tech entrepreneurs and tech start-ups in Ireland, but their potential is being constrained by a significant shortage of scale-up capital. We need to stimulate the supply of local institutional funding. The Government’s proposed Personal Investment Account could become one mechanism for encouraging greater domestic investment, helping to boost economic growth and jobs.”

Mr Watson heads up Furthr VC which has a current portfolio of 22 companies specialising in medtech and B2B software across Ireland. A graduate in electronic engineering and biomedical engineering research from Trinity College, he holds an MBA from Durham University.