Record levels of investment flowed into Northern Ireland’s tech firms over the last year as overseas and indigenous funders backed the country’s best businesses.
New data from science park Catalyst showed that £100.7 million was invested across 66 deals in local “innovation” companies last year, a 127% jump on 2020 and sharply higher than the £5 million invested in 2014.
Of note, around 75% of that funding came from overseas investors who have steadily upped their interest in the region’s entrepreneurial companies in recent years. Funds such as Tiger Global, Angular Ventures and Ada Ventures invested here for the first time with Frontline, MMC and Par Equity continuing their support of NI companies.
The average amount invested in each deal was more than £1.5 million, an increase of more than £387,000 on the average funding round recorded in 2020.
“2020 was a year of consolidation for investment across the UK – battening down the hatches as the impact of Covid forced investors to back their existing portfolio at the expense of doing new deals,” Kieran Dalton, Head of Scaling at Catalyst, said. “However, as we all became more resilient to this new way of working, investment very quickly recovered and surpassed what we in Northern Ireland have ever seen.”
Cloudsmith, a cloud platform for software supply chain management, was one of the companies which secured investment. Its $15 million funding round is Northern Ireland’s largest Series A and was led by investment firm Tiger Global, along with participation from existing investors including Frontline Ventures, MMC and NI based VC Techstart Ventures.
“Cloudsmith was built to tackle the complexity of managing software assets,” Alan Carson, CEO of Cloudsmith, said. “It’s a massive problem for the whole industry and our investors, led by Tiger Global, understand the need for a fully managed cloud-native solution that Cloudsmith provides.
