The Irish Tech News Podcast

Back in 2017 when the Irish Tech News podcast was in its second year, one of my guests was Darya Yegorina  the founder of CleverBooks. In 2020 I caught up with Darya and did a written interview to see what happened since the podcast.
Darya has recently launched a new venture Arventa, AI software designed in Ireland for Irish SMEs that helps to make business ops efficient and compliant, and to find out more about Arventa I caught with Darya .
Darya talks about her background, Arventa, AI and more.
More about Arventa:
Arventa provides an all-in-one toolkit designed specifically for startups and freelancers. Our platform enhances productivity with tools for invoicing, proposals, CRM, time tracking, social media management, and compliance. Complementing, not replacing, accountants and accounting software, working seamlessly alongside them. Arventa's mission is to deliver an affordable solution tailored to meet the unique needs of micro businesses, helping them streamline their operations and achieve growth.

Something that is not talked about enough is pay transparency and the fact that on the 7th of June 2026 all EU countries had to comply with the EU pay discrepancy act. Ireland missed this deadline but will bring it on a phased basis and employers have been urged to take steps to prepare for its full implementation.
To find out more about pay transparency and the EU pay discrepancy act I spoke to Crystel Robbins Rynne CEO HRLocker and Fredericka Sheppard Co-Founder and Managing Director Voltedge
Crystal and Fredericka talk about their backgrounds, salaries, putting good frameworks in place and more.
More about HRLocker and Voltedge:
HRLocker is the Irish people-management platform that transforms admin-heavy tasks, such as time & attendance and leave management, into one secure, intuitive system, so HR teams reclaim hours, eliminate errors, and focus on strategic people initiatives, not paperwork.
Voltedge Management is an Irish-based HR consultancy supporting scaling businesses, SMEs, and multinational organisations with strategic HR, leadership, and organisational development solutions. The firm partners with clients across Ireland, the UK, and internationally to build high-performing teams and drive sustainable growth.

A lot of businesses are overpaying for outdated ways of working, and AI is reshaping their expectations around creative, strategy and operational costs. To find out more about this I spoke to Seamus Begley, founder of creative studio, The Studio of Possible.
Seamus talks about ahis background, what the Studio of Possible does, why many businesses overpay for outdated ways of working, how AI is reshaping expectations around creative, strategy and operational costs and more.
More about The Studio of Possible:
They are a Design Practice that works with forward thinking individuals, brands and businesses to increase their impact on the world around us

Many people in this country don't have access to reliable financial guidance — so they're increasingly asking a free chatbot instead. The problem? A general-purpose model trained on Reddit threads inherits Reddit's appetite for risk, and now that skew shows up in the conversations people are having about their money. 
In this new episode of One Vision Podcast, Alisha Chowdhury, Founder of Kiro Money, joins Theodora Lau to argue that the same technology, pointed with different intentions, can do the opposite: close the advice gap instead of widening it.
Alisha traces the origin of Kiro back to a socioeconomically diverse Bangladeshi community in New Orleans — the "aunties and uncles" who taught her immigrant parents how to navigate an unfamiliar financial system — and to the University of Pennsylvania, where she saw real wealth and learned how it's built for the first time. After years as an investor at Vanguard and in private equity, she left for an MBA in London and started building the earliest version of Kiro: a low-code, RAG-based coach fed only sources she trusted. "Not garbage in."
Today Kiro is an embedded financial intelligence layer that lets a bank or investing platform drop a context-aware AI coach directly into its own app, so users get guidance where their data and their relationship already live. 
A conversation about financial inclusion, the advice gap, and what it takes to build AI for money that people can actually trust. Because when it comes to money, trust has to be earned — and tested.

🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

Keywords: AI, Fintech, GenerativeAI, AI Agents, Chatbots
📍”The vision of why I started this is to give back to people like my parents, is to give back to a younger version of myself, and making sure that access truly means access.”

Timestamps
00:00 Welcome and Introductions
01:22 Alisha’s Founder Roots
02:38 From New Orleans to Finance
04:48 Career Path and MBA Pivot
07:35 What Kiro Money Builds
10:19 AI Agents and Product Vision
12:27 Trust, Emotion, and Community
17:36 Safety Guardrails and Testing
22:12 Impact Metrics and Closing

More about our guests 
🌐Alisha Chowdhury on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisha-chowdhury-163808122/

More about our host and One Vision Podcast 
🌐Theodora Lau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodoralau/ 
🌐Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence (book): https://www.bankingonaibook.com/ 
🌐Unconventional Ventures (company): https://www.unconventionalventures.com/ 
🌐Listen to all One Vision Podcast episodes by visiting: https://shows.acast.com/one-vision

As various nations prepare for future lunar landings, interest in space exploration has never been greater especially in Ireland. In Cork the UCC Rocketry and Space Exploration Society which was founded last year has been very busy, launching 5 rockets.
To find out more about what the UCC Rocketry and Space Exploration Society are doing and the Irish interest in space exploration I spoke to members of the UCC Rocketry and Space Exploration Society.
The members told me when they started the society, Ireland’s first flight computer, Mach-26 Rocketry competition, For All Mankind and more:
More about UCC Rocketry and Space Exploration Society:
Since being founded last year, they have launched 5 rockets. This includes Prometheus, their largest rocket yet which got  5th in the Mach-X Rocketry and Cansat Competition in their respective category. 
Their current projects include:
- Ireland’s first flight computer: Recently test-launched in Portlaw, Waterford.
- Liquid propellant motor, currently under construction for the Race 2 Space competition, where their design review ranked third in their category.
- Ireland’s first two-stage rocket, scheduled to fly this summer in the Mach-26 Rocketry Competition.