10 Irish Start Ups Thinking Big And Showing How It Is Done Internationally

We live on a small island and the biggest problem that many start up businesses have is that they only look for potential customers within Ireland itself. While you can certainly build an Irish business with Irish customers alone, the world is a big place and to truly scale you need to sell internationally. We’ve identified a handful of start ups who think big with a global market and have a huge amount of international customers. We can take a lot of inspiration from these 10 Irish companies:

Funked Up Fixies

The two guys behind the company started making bikes for their mates and their products have become so popular that they now ship all across Europe. All bikes are fully customisable and you can create thousands of options on the site and have them delivered straight to your door.

Wyldsson

These super healthy sports snacks are used by athletes all over the world even though they are produced right here in Dublin and the company is still in it’s infancy. What I love about them is they refuse to take the easy route and sell in shops for a quick buck and instead are online only and targeting a global market. Will be huge in the years to come.

Currencyfair

This is one of the fastest growing companies in Ireland and they have been very smart in targeting Irish people abroad in places like Australia and the USA who want to send money home at great rates. Because of that international focus they now have clients all over the world.

Kitman Labs

Software for athletes to help manage their performance which started up in Dublin and had some great success winning their first customers here. Didn’t rest on their laurels though and quickly raised more money, move half the team to the USA and quickly won some huge clients over there and continue to expand rapidly. Read our interview with them here.

Trustev

They have been growing in leaps and bounds from a small office in Cork to offices all over the USA. They have won every award going across the globe for emerging start up and now have large multinational clients in the USA and hiring lots of staff. Read Pat Phelan’s Trends interview here.

The Web Summit

We think of the Web Summit as being a company that is purely focused on Dublin but while many would have been happy with the success of one event they have expanded to a 2nd conference in Las Vegas and now a third in Hong Kong. You can expect them to go on and become one of the biggest conference organisers in the world over the coming years.

Drop

It is incredibly hard to create a hardware start that comes out of Ireland but that is exactly what the guys have done with their connected weighing scales. Any company that can get their product stocked in Apple retail stores is onto something pretty major.

Ding

Their founder Mark Roden was recently named the Irish entrepreneur of the year and rightly so because his mobile top up company (which allows you to send credit to people all across the globe) now has 100,000 people using it daily. A truly global company making huge waves. Mark also featured on our Ones To Watch 2015 feature.

Viddyad

Only started in 2013 and won the top prize at the Web Summit a couple of months after, but now these guys have offices in America and are expanding all across the globe. Wall-to-wall media coverage and best of all a passionate female founder in the male tech dominated world.

Intercom

With 4000 enterprise customers across the world, the guys behind Intercom have moved some of their team to the USA but the vast majority remain here. The company has over $20 million in funding and with a growing team and wonderful product they’ll become an even bigger force globally over the coming years.