Here's how one of the country's best tech investors chooses where to put its money

TECH STARTUPS THAT have a cool new product, can scale abroad and have some sort of customer base are the ones that tick the boxes for investors.

That is according to Helen McBreen, an investment director with Atlantic Bridge, one of Ireland’s top venture capital firms.

“Building a tech business starts with building an entrepreneur and exploiting major growth on the world stage,” she told Fora.

“For a tech startup (you have to ask) does it have a unique proposition and a large enough set of customers. Can it disrupt a market or create a new one.”

Speaking ahead of the inaugural Data Science Awards later this month, which aims to highlight emerging scientific talent in Ireland, McBreen, who is a judge at the awards, added that international expansion is crucial for scaling a business.

“We apply our international platform alongside investment and provide customers with access to key markets,” she said. “A lot of companies need investors that have international platforms that can scale to international markets.”

Major investor

Atlantic Bridge is a major international investor, with $500 million of assets under management across four funds and offices in Dublin, London, Beijing and Silicon Valley.

The Irish arm of the firm, which is one of the largest private investment firms in the country, recently announced a €60 million investment fund for startups emerging from third-level research projects that is managed by McBreen.

Atlantic Bridge Ireland has taken stakes in some of Ireland’s best known tech companies, such as computer-chip maker Movidius, which was acquired earlier this week by Intel in a deal thought to be worth at least €300 million.

Movidius co-founders David Moloney (left) and Sean Mitchell

“It is very much about trying to find a strong intellectual property and a strong team and trying to scale early-stage companies,” McBreen said.

“It does vary company to company, revenue should be generated from where the customer base is.

“The customer may be in Europe but they could also be in the US or the far east. You may have traction early on with Irish company (but) large revenue is generated from customers internationally.”

Scaling

Some observers would have expressed disappointment at the sale of Movidius as the company represented one of Ireland’s best hopes of a major independent indigenous tech firm. The company had been tipped to be a ‘unicorn’; a startup valued at over $1 billion.

However McBreen said that she does not think that the idea of a unicorn “is the best measure of success”.

“For any venture capital firm the best measure of success is delivering a return to your investors,” she said.

Asked if she thought there is a tendency among Irish tech companies to sell early she said: “I don’t think so, the decisions made by companies to sell are decisions to extract the most value, to get the technology into the market and to capitalise on it.”

She added that Ireland is a good place to scale a company.

“There is a vibrant startup system here. There is very strong research in universities and investors can deliver success like they did with movidius,” she said. “It is about finding the right time for the technology and the markets.”