In celebrating the Irish ahead of St. Patrick’s Day later this month, we decided to look at some of the most successful tech entrepreneurs to emerge from the Emerald Isle.

According to The Central Statistics Office, 123,400 people work in the IT sector in Ireland. In addition, research shows that Ireland is home to 16 of the 20 largest global tech companies, along with three of the largest enterprise software providers worldwide, including IBM, SAP and Oracle.

With so many large tech companies such as Apple, Meta, Cisco and Microsoft making Ireland their second home, the country has become a booming hub for innovation.

That being said, we uncovered a number of talented Irish tech founders who are putting Ireland well and truly on the map.

Eoghan McCabe, Chairman and Co-founder, Intercom

As a communications platform for business, Intercom was founded in California in 2011 by four Irish entrepreneurs, Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, and David Barrett. Eoghan McCabe started his entrepreneurial journey by building the America Online website in 1996. Harnessing an ambition to start his own company, he later co-founded Exceptional, a SaaS company that created developer tools to help pinpoint bugs in web apps. As part of his app, Eoghan helped to build a JavaScript chat bubble to help users communicate.

It was this that led him to realise the need for web-based companies to have more efficient customer communication systems, and so Intercom was born. Now based in San Francisco, the global company has over 800 employees with over 230 million euros in revenues. The Irish entrepreneur now gives talks at some of the biggest tech conferences in the world and has co-authored the book ‘Intercom on Starting Up’ which is packed full of useful advice for other people looking to set up their own business. 

Patrick and John Collison, Co-founders, Stripe

Billionaire brothers Patrick and John Collision found their calling in Stripe, a payment service provider that lets online merchants accept credit and debit cards or other payments. The ambitious pair developed the company in 2010, having previously set up a number of startups, from an iPhone app enabling offline access to Wikipedia and a software-as-a-service platform for big sellers on eBay to track inventory and traffic. The idea for Stripe first emerged when the brothers became frustrated at how difficult it was to accept payments online. Working together, they developed a simple solution and, within just two weeks, processed their first transaction. Stripe is worth 60 billion euros and has around seven thousand employees globally. It’s estimated that Irish businesses have processed over 20 billion euros in transactions through Stripe over the past decade alone.

Paddy Cosgrave, Co-founder, WebSummit

Co-founder of the global tech conference WebSummit, Paddy Cosgrave, took entrepreneurship in Ireland to a new level when he established the company alongside David Kelly and Daire Hickey in 2009. Starting in Dublin, Ireland, with just 400 attendees, it now attracts over seventy thousand attendees to its main event in Lisbon each year. The concept for WebSummit was born out of Paddy Cosgrave’s frustration in attending conferences. At the time, he was just twenty-five years of age, profiling general electron candidates for a database. Believing there was a different way of approaching events for startups, he channelled all of his energy into creating the tech conference, which began in Dublin, Ireland and later made its way to Lisbon, Portugal. Today, WebSummit boasts over seventy thousand attendees and partners from Fortune 500 companies. It also hosts other conferences, including RISE in Hong Kong, SURGE in Bangalore and Collision in Toronto. 

Darragh McCarthy, CEO and Founder, FinTrU

Fintech company FinTrU was founded by Irish entrepreneur Darragh McCarthy in 2013. The firm creates technology-enabled solutions for global financial institutions. With over thirty years of experience, Darragh developed the concept for his company when he realised a growing demand for technology-led services that would help organisations navigate a changing regulatory landscape. Today, the company employs over 1,400 people across its offices in Belfast, Letterkenny, Derry, London, New York, Porto, and Maastricht. It mainly works with global investment banks based across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Patricia Scanlon, Founder, SoapBox Labs

Female Irish entrepreneur and parent Patricia Scanlon has made waves across the tech sector with her speech recognition technology for kids. The concept was born when playing with her three-year-old daughter. She quickly realised that while apps were great at helping her daughter learn math, they weren’t so effective when teaching language and fluency. Today, Soapbox Labs creates voice recognition technology for the edtech, entertainment and toy industries. Its unique voice engine provides accurate speech-to-text transcriptions and education-specific data features for educators globally. The company was sold in 2023 to US education technology business Curriculum Associates (CA), and today, Patricia also has a role as Ireland’s AI Ambassador.

Shane Curran, Founder, Evervault

Shane Curran is one of Ireland’s youngest tech entrepreneurs who has been making headlines lately. The young entrepreneur founded data-privacy technology firm Evervault when he was just 19 years of age. Evervault is an encryption infrastructure company that makes collecting, processing, and sharing sensitive data ultra-secure. When Shane started his company, it was initially a research project that would help people to understand encryption. This later evolved into a leading data privacy firm that received funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and other investors. Today, it employs over 31 people from its base in Dublin, Ireland.