[August 22, 2018]

Enterprise Ireland Puts Female-Led Irish Companies at Center of Investment, Growth and Development Efforts

In 2017, Enterprise Ireland (News - Alert) invested more than $36 million in over 180 start-up companies - 37% of these investments were to female entrepreneurs. Today, Enterprise Ireland maintains a $1.2 million competitive start-up fund solely for female entrepreneurs, last year, 46% of companies who received Competitive Start-Up funds from Enterprise Ireland were female-led.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180822005143/en/

(Graphic: Business Wire)

"Enterprise Ireland wants to see more women scaling their businesses successfully," said Julie Sinnamon, CEO, Enterprise Ireland. "We are very proud to work with many, inspiring female entrepreneurs, facilitating their access to new markets and growing their opportunities."

The Competitive Start Fund (CSF) was created to accelerate the growth of start-up companies that have the capability to succeed in global markets. The fund is designed to enable those companies to reach key technical and commercial milestones.

According to Sinnamon, the fund aims to support early stage start-ups specifically for Female Entrepreneurs or female-led start-ups, active in the Manufacturing and Internationally Traded Services sectors including the following subsectors: Internet, Games, Apps, Mobile, SaaS (News - Alert), Cloud Computing, Enterprise Software, Lifesciences, Food, Cleantech and Industrial Products.

"We need to address all of the constraints that are impacting the growth of women-owned start-ups," said Sinnamon. "In 2012, only 7% of the startups we were dealing with were female-led. We decided to try to understand some of the issues that might be impacting this."

According to research by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, women in the United States are 18% less likely than men to perceive the have the capability to start a business. Sinnamon is working to address this confidence gap and boost the number of women owned businesses.

"In trying to increase the number of female-owned high potential startups, we boiled it down to three key issues: access to finance, confidence, and a lack of role models or access to networks," said Sinnamon. By tackling each of these three key areas, Enterprise Ireland has been able to increase the proportion of female owned start-ups in its portfolio from 7% to 22%.

While there is still progress to be made, supporting female entrepreneurship is paying off with continued growth of female-led startups. Here are just a few recent success examples:

Cloud KPI
CloudKPI is an analytics platform that helps SaaS businesses predict their future performance, enabling them make decisions today to deliver better outcomes tomorrow. CloudKPI's reporting and predictive analytics offer SaaS teams an automated solution to consolidate cross-business data, formulate accurate SaaS metrics and deliver insight - exclusively tailored for SaaS.

Cocoa Brown
Cocoa Brown launched four years ago with the world's first 1 HOUR TAN and has since gained cult-status internationally amongst celebrities and beauty editors, from the pages of Teen Vogue to The Oscars red carpet. Cocoa Brown products are sold in almost 15,000 stores around the world, from the UK to Scandinavia, North America, Russia, Australia and Europe.

GirlCrew
There are countless apps available to find a date, but what about new friends? GirlCrew has created a unique platform focused on connecting women for friendship and chats. They launched their app in the U.S. this year after raising almost $1 million from investors including LinkedIn (News - Alert) CEO Jeff Weiner. GirlCrew's three female co-founders, Elva Carri, Pamela Newenham and Aine Mulloy, are passionate about enabling women to make friends, network in a social and professional capacity, seek advice and share knowledge.

PharmaPod
The Pharmapod Solution is a smart, intuitive and profession-specific platform designed to facilitate effective compliance with pharmacy legislation and complement the workflow within the pharmacy, reducing the risk of litigation through error prevention. It enables pharmacists to systematically record medication-related incidents and risks in practice and carry out effective root-cause analysis.

Salaso
Salaso is passionate about the power and value of exercise to enhance recovery from injury and support the management of pain and musculoskeletal conditions. Regardless of whether you are an elite athlete recovering from injury, someone dealing with an ongoing chronic painful condition or if you are recovering from an operation such as a total hip replacement, Salaso believes there is always an exercise that can improve your physical health and wellbeing.

About Enterprise Ireland

Enterprise Ireland is the Irish State agency that works with Irish enterprises to help them start, grow, innovate and win export sales in global markets. Enterprise Ireland partners with entrepreneurs, Irish businesses, and the research and investment communities to develop Ireland's international trade, innovation, leadership and competitiveness. In this way, we support sustainable economic growth and regional development, and help create and sustain employment in Ireland.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180822005143/en/

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