Digital Irish Podcast

GEC 25 Year Impact Report: https://www.gec.ie/impact-report 
Niamh Collins has spent more than 15 years inside Ireland's startup ecosystem, and for the last three she has run the Guinness Enterprise Centre — one of Ireland's first enterprise hubs and now one of its largest, home to over 160 companies across five floors of a former Guinness hop store in the Liberties. Her vantage point is the connective tissue of the ecosystem: the introductions, signposting and supports that turn a founder with an idea into a company selling into the US, the UK and Europe.
In this conversation, we get into:
What "managed serendipity" looks like in practice — how one founder's presentation to a visiting Tampa Bay delegation turned into a new customer, a research partner and a US investor introduction

The supports most Irish founders don't know exist — monthly Local Enterprise Office clinics, Mentoring for Scale, and soft-landing agreements with hubs in the UK, US and Europe

What 25 years of the GEC adds up to — 1,300+ companies through the doors, and approximately €140M in turnover and €73M+ in exports from GEC companies last year alone

What "graduating" really means — Urban Fox's €8M raise, Mobility Mojo's €4.2M, and why the GEC doesn't say goodbye, just "see you for a while"

The role of the Irish diaspora — mentoring, investing, opening doors, and Niamh's open invitation to the Digital Irish community

If you're an Irish founder — or part of the diaspora wondering how to help from abroad — this episode is a map of the ecosystem behind Ireland's startup success.

Niamh Collins has served as Centre Director of the Guinness Enterprise Centre since 2023. She brings over 15 years’ experience within Ireland’s startup ecosystem, with a strong track record of supporting early-stage companies to grow and scale through incubation, acceleration, and tailored business support programmes. Prior to joining the GEC, she was Director of the NovaUCD AgTech Innovation Centre and previously held the role of Chief Operating Officer at the DCU Ryan Academy.
The Guinness Enterprise Centre is Ireland’s largest enterprise campus, located in Dublin 8, and is home to 160 companies ranging from individual founders to established scaling teams. These companies operate across a diverse range of sectors, including digital health, medtech, technology, sustainability, aviation, professional services. The Centre provides a combination of co-working and private office space, alongside a comprehensive suite of business supports, programmes, and advisory clinics designed to enable growth, innovation, and international expansion.
Want to get in contact with the Digital Irish team? Email us at podcast@digitalirish.com

Bernard McCaul has spent almost twenty years inside GOAL, the Irish humanitarian agency founded nearly fifty years ago when sports journalist John O'Shea came home from Kolkata and decided to act. Bernard has been on the ground for the Asian tsunami, the Haiti earthquake, and the West Africa Ebola outbreak, and he is now part of the team growing GOAL's presence in the US. That vantage point — twenty years at the sharp end of the world's worst crises — makes this a conversation about how humanitarian aid actually works, not how people assume it works.In this conversation, we get into:
Sierra Leone, 2014: what it takes to head for the epicenter of an Ebola outbreak while others are leaving — and how the Community-Led Action approach born there became a national tool that turned Sierra Leone into a leader in outbreak response.
The AI chatbots GOAL built with Sierra Leone's Ministry of Health during the recent mpox outbreak — sharing official information with at-risk communities and feeding live data back to responders — now being deployed to the Ebola response in Central Africa.
Why crises happen when local systems collapse, and why aid delivered without understanding those systems can do more harm than good.
What people get wrong about aid — including how the outbreak of war, not aid failure, set Sudan back thirty years.
Bernard's case for hope: near-universal internet access is coming, and early warning systems protecting every person on the planet are genuinely achievable.

If you're part of the Irish diaspora and want to see what fifty years of Irish humanitarian leadership looks like on the ground — and where it goes next — this one is worth your time.

About Bernard McCaul
Bernard McCaul is GOAL USA’s Executive Director and has been with GOAL for almost twenty years, much of that leading the organisation's work in Latin America, with senior roles spanning programme leadership across GOAL's global operations.
He has been part of GOAL's responses to the 2004 Asian tsunami, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and the 2014–15 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. He is now with GOAL USA, supporting the organisation's growth in North America.

About GOAL
GOAL is an organization of humanitarian crisis experts founded in Ireland almost fifty years ago by sports journalist John O'Shea. It responds to the world's most significant humanitarian crises — both sudden-onset emergencies and protracted crises — and has worked across almost sixty countries, with a mission to save lives, reduce suffering, and build resilience, and a vision of a world beyond humanitarian crisis.
GOAL runs an Innovation Lab and Innovation Fund backing solutions like AI-driven disease surveillance, and GOAL USA is a registered charity partner of the New York and Chicago Marathons.
Supporters can also take part in the GOAL Mile in Ireland, join immersive site visits to programmes on the ground, or donate at goalus.org and goalglobal.org.

Want to get in contact with the Digital Irish team? Email us at podcast@digitalirish.com

Fergal Mullen left Ireland at 18 on an athletics scholarship and has spent 25 years in venture — first inside a NASDAQ-listed consultancy, then at Highland Capital Partners in Boston, before spinning out its European arm in 2012 to co-found Highland Europe. The firm now manages close to €4 billion, sees around 3,000 companies a year, and invests in seven or eight. Very few people can tell founders what happens on the other side of the table with that much of a funnel behind them.
In this conversation, we get into:
What “coachable founder” actually means — and why the softest criterion on Highland Europe’s list is the one that decides.

The bar for a growth-stage cheque: €10M+ revenue, 50%+ growth, and unit economics that treat investors’ capital with respect.

Why Highland Europe scrapped the Monday partner pitch and meets founders at their own offices — and what they read from how you treat your team.

The pitch that won an investment without a single slide.

How the firm separates foundational AI businesses from wrappers a single model release could erase.

If you’re an Irish founder — raising now or a few years out — this episode is a look at exactly what the other side of the table is checking for.

Fergal Mullen is a co-founder and Partner at Highland Europe, the growth-stage technology investment firm based in London and Geneva.
Prior to founding Highland Europe, Fergal was a Partner at Highland Capital Partners, where he launched the firm’s European investment program in 2007.
Over the course of his career, Fergal has been involved with a number of leading technology companies, including Coremetrics (acquired by IBM), GlassesDirect (acquired by Essilor), Wooga (acquired by Playtika), Finanzcheck (acquired by Scout24), Privalia (acquired by Veepee), PhotoBox (acquired by Exponent Private Equity and Electra Partners), He has also been involved with VistaPrint (NASDAQ IPO), AMCS Group (acquired by EQT), and Nexthink (acquired by Vista Equity Partners).
Earlier in his career, Fergal was a founding partner of RSA Ventures, the corporate venture arm of RSA Security.
Before that, he was a founder and Senior Vice President of Cambridge Technology Partners (NASDAQ: CATP), where he served on the firm’s Global Executive Committee.
Fergal attended Harvard Business School where he earned his MBA and Brown University where he earned a BSc in Electrical Engineering and a BA in Business Economics.
Highland Europe is a growth-stage technology investment firm with offices in London and Geneva. Founded in 2012, the firm backs European software and consumer internet companies that have established product-market fit — typically €10 million or more in revenue, growing 50%+ — with cheques of €30–70 million. Highland Europe has backed close to 100 companies, holds around 60 in its current portfolio, and manages nearly €4 billion across six funds.
Want to get in contact with the Digital Irish team? Email us at podcast@digitalirish.com
About Fergal MullenAbout Highland Europe

Kieran Corbett has seen the Irish startup journey from every side of the table. He started out trading futures in Dublin, began writing angel checks into early-stage Irish companies in 2015, and has kept backing them since moving to New York in 2016 — where he now invests at Studio VC, a seed-stage fund whose portfolio includes Wayflyer. That vantage point — Irish angel, US-based VC, and brother of a Wayflyer co-founder — makes him unusually well placed to explain what actually happens on the investor's side of a pitch.
In this conversation, we get into:
What US VCs are actually underwriting for — and why “this could be worth millions” is the wrong answer in an American pitch meeting

The venture math from the inside: a 24-company fund, the power law, and where your business fits in a fund's returns

How much to raise at seed ($2.5–5M) and the roadmap Kieran expects to see behind that number

What Wayflyer showed investors early on that most founders don't

Why AI has made a working product table stakes — and made defensibility a much harder question

If you're an Irish founder with a US raise anywhere in your plans, this episode is thirty minutes of seeing your pitch from the other side of the table.

About Kieran Corbett
Kieran Corbett is an investor at Studio VC in New York. Originally from Cork, he began his career as a derivatives trader at Positive Equity in Dublin, where he started channelling his trading capital into angel investments in early-stage Irish companies from 2015. He moved to the US in 2016 and has continued writing angel checks into Irish startups for the past decade alongside his work in venture. He is also active in supporting Irish founders expanding to the US, including recent panel work with Enterprise Ireland in New York.
About Studio VC
Studio VC is a New York-based venture capital firm investing at the seed stage, with a focus on enterprise AI, fintech, and SaaS-enabled marketplaces across the US and Europe. 
Want to get in contact with the Digital Irish team? Email us at podcast@digitalirish.com

Niall Dennehy's first bank account was opened in 1987, when his mother walked him ten metres from their front door to the credit union in Ballydesmond, Co. Cork — a branch named for Nora Herlihy, the local schoolteacher who helped found the Irish credit union movement. He still gets the statement every month. Nearly four decades on, having co-founded blockchain company AID:Tech and gone through Techstars, he's a father of four in Dublin building NestiFi: an AI-powered platform that lets whole families, wherever they've scattered, invest together in a child's future.
In this conversation, we get into:
The 1987 credit union account Niall still gets statements for, and how it became the blueprint for NestiFi

Why the cash-stuffed-envelope economy shortchanges kids, and how a tap in the family WhatsApp chat can put relatives anywhere in the world into a child's investment account

The tax reliefs most Irish parents have never heard of, including the small gift exemption worth up to €108,000 per child over 18 years from parents alone

Trump accounts in the US, and Niall's lobbying push to get the Irish government to seed every newborn's account the same way

What 1–2% in annual fees quietly does to 30 years of compounding, and why credit unions are best placed to win back the next generation from Revolut and Robinhood

If you're a parent, a grandparent, or anyone thinking about the next generation's financial future, this episode is a practical look at how families can start compounding early.
$84 trillion is expected to change hands in the US over the next 20 years; roughly €3.5 trillion in Europe by 2030 (figures Niall cites on tape).

$2,500 seeded at birth plus $75/month from the wider family ≈ $40,000 by age 18 and $106,871 by age 30 (NestiFi's illustration; assumes a 7.35% average annual return compounded monthly).

Niall Dennehy is the CEO and co-founder of NestiFi. Originally from Ballydesmond, Co. Cork, he co-founded AID:Tech, the blockchain company that delivered international aid transparently through digital identity, and went through Techstars in 2016. His earlier career spanned publishing, education and fintech, including roles with HP, Ericsson, LG Mobile, AIB and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He lives in Dublin with his wife and four children — the original test users for NestiFi. [Confirm bio with Niall — drafted from the recording and public sources; no formal bio provided.]
NestiFi is a Dublin-headquartered, AI-powered family wealth platform that financial institutions deploy under their own brand. It lets parents, grandparents and relatives anywhere in the world contribute to a child's investment account from a link in the messaging apps families already use, with an AI advisor (“Seb”) and gamified financial literacy built in. A B2B2C play targeting credit unions and community banks on both sides of the Atlantic, NestiFi is backed by Enterprise Ireland as a High Potential Start-Up, closed a 108% oversubscribed crowdfunding round on Spark Venture Funding in July 2026, and has announced a partnership with Vyrdia, a credit union service organization whose network spans more than 30 US credit unions with $6.5 billion in combined assets.
Want to get in contact with the Digital Irish team? Email us at podcast@digitalirish.com
Key StatsAbout Niall DennehyAbout NestiFi