EdgeTier, Winner H1 2019 

"We’re delighted with this recognition from Google. Participating in the programme has been a revelation for us. We realised early in the programme that we needed to focus on two key objectives – growing our company outside of Ireland and scaling our team with the best possible people for that growth. Over the course of the 8-week programme, we had fantastic access to Google specialists who helped us to find solutions to some of the challenges we were facing."

“We recently secured a €1.5m seed funding round from the UK and Irish-based investors that will enable us to aggressively grow the company in the coming months. The insights from Google’s Adopt a Start-Up Programme will help us to scale more effectively, avoiding pitfalls along the way. “Customer service is a gigantic market; there are over 6,000 customer contact centres in the UK alone. Our software has been shown to deliver up to an 80% reduction in handling times, making customer care agents five times more efficient than colleagues not using Arthur. T

"The opportunities for our technology scale beyond pure efficiency, with gains for operations teams in data access and visibility across the centre. “Using Google analytics and market finder helped us to really understand our target markets and our competitors’ activities, allowing us to refine our sales approach and help identify new opportunities. Engaging with the Google Cloud team and the Talent team has also given us fresh insights into scaling our business and particularly our sales function”.

AllergyLifeStyle, 2nd Place H1 2019 

AllergyLifestyle.com, a Mayo based company specialising in Emergency Medicines Cases, Medical ID and Allergy training, was delighted to secure second place in the Grand Final of Google’s Adopt a Start-up Programme.

Speaking at the final, Paddy Flynn, head of Google Ireland’s Start-up Programme, said: “What the judges liked was that Allergy Lifestyle demonstrated really good learning, showed an ability to make changes quickly and a potential to do great things with this business” Founder of Allergy Lifestyle, Anne Walsh said ‘We found the Google Adopt a Start Up Programme mix of lectures, mentor sessions and google tools invaluable. The team worked really hard over the course of the programme to achieve results which had a real impact on sales. Our aim is to leverage the skills and expertise we acquired to achieve significant growth in new markets over the coming months. Our Vision is for AllergyLifestyle.com to be recognised as a global brand for Anaphylaxis & Emergency medicine products.'

For more information visit AllergyLifestyle.com 

UrbanVolt, Winner H2 2018 

Energy Specialist UrbanVolt have been named the winner of Google’s Adopt A Startup 2018 Autumn Programme. UrbanVolt, a Dublin based startup helps you upgrade your commercial lighting to energy-saving LEDs with zero capital investment. They provide all the lights and manage the entire project from start to finish with no upfront investment. You save 75% on your energy bill and our monthly subscription fee comes out of the savings. "We think that’s fair."

Hannah Cusack, Business Development Lead, UrbanVolt said:  “At UrbanVolt we were grateful to have been selected to partake in the Google Adopt A Startup programme and now ecstatic to have been crowned overall winner from such a competitive pool of businesses. We have already realised the commercial value of the defined objectives and targeted key results derived from working with our Google mentors over the twelve week period. We will continue on our growth journey upgrading business to LED and having a positive impact on the environment.

Anne James, Marketing Manager at UrbanVolt, described the win as “a wonderful recognition of the work our team put into the programme over the past 12 weeks”. She offered insights into how the team earned the top spot: “At the outset, we identified a number of OKRs (objectives and key results), the achievement of which has transformed our business. Our Google mentors shared their expertise in automating business processes and scaling, and we’re excited to put our learnings to the test in the US market.”

Agritech firm Terra Liquid Minerals wins the spring edition of Adopt A Startup 2018

Terra Liquid Minerals, an automated dispensing system for animal liquid supplements and medication, was named winner of Adopt A Startup 2018 Spring Edition. In the five years it has been in business, it has worked with farmers across the world to improve herd health using agritech and automation to accurately feed minerals in water.

Winner of the Adopt A Startup 2018 Spring programme, Padraig Hennessy, CEO, Terra Liquid Minerals said “We’re delighted to be named winner of Google’s Adopt A Startup programme and feel it validates the hard work we’ve put into the programme over the past twelve weeks. We set a number of OKR’s (Objectives and Key Results) at the outset of the programme and we achieved them with significant results with the help from our team of Googlers".

He added: "Our business provides smart technology to farmers across the country to ensure their herds are receiving the correct minerals on a daily basis. At the moment, the majority of our sales leads are in Ireland which is why one of our objectives for the Adopt A Startup programme was to increase the number of targeted hits to our website from International users to help us scale globally. We found out that of the international hits we already had, there was a high bounce rate because of our .ie domain, to combat this we started to localise our website domain to different jurisdictions such as .co.uk which helped us increase the number of international visitors we had.”

Veri, Winner H2 2017 

Veri have been named the winner of Google’s Adopt A Startup 2017 Autumn Programme. Veri, a Kilkenny based startup helps trainers to track and review training performance from their mobile phone – making the use of paper forms redundant, reducing administration time by up to 30% and allowing users to quality assure their training.

Founder Ann-Marie McSorley said:  “We put a lot of time into getting the most out of Google’s Adopt A Startup programme and this win validates the team’s hard work. We set out clear, precise objectives at the start of the programme and with the help of our Google mentors we achieved significant results across them all. In our business we help digitise compliance for companies across various sectors including health and construction.

As we are entirely web based, it’s important that people are able to find us, which is why increasing our web presence by 15% was a massive achievement. Perfectly timed in conjunction with the launch of our exciting new analytics product, the programme resulted in an increase in potential sales leads of 20%. We are absolutely delighted to be named overall winner of Google’s Adopt A Startup programme and would like to thank the team and our mentors for all the help they gave us throughout the programme”. 

Logograb - Winner H1 2017

Dublin company LogoGrab, whose technology is used to identify brands imagery in images and video took home the crown in the Spring edition of the 2017 Adopt A Startup programme after a dragons den style final held in Google’s EMEA headquarters in Dublin.

Speaking about Adopt A Startup, Luca Boschin, CEO, LogoGrab said: “We had two main objectives heading into Google’s Adopt A Startup, namely to reduce our costs on the engineering side of the business and to increase the volume of our inbound sales leads.” He added, “In our business we deal with billions of images and we managed to reduce our costs by 45% by moving from Amazon AWS to Google Cloud for the processing power we require. On the marketing side of the business we have generated a pipeline of 1.2 million just from the changes implemented during our time on the Adopt a Startup Programme alone, so we are absolutely delighted with the results and to have been named the overall winners.” 

Arklu - Winner 2016, Ian Harkin, Managing Director

“Business is going well, we’ve already exceeded last year’s numbers and we are now entering our busiest two months of the year, last year we doubled the previous year’s turnover and this year we hope to do the same again. Our products are inspired by ideas sent to us by kids, we show that there are many ways to enjoy childhood and to enjoy childhood you simply just have to be yourself. In developing our brand we try to teach kids that anything is possible, we take this inspiration ourselves and believe we can compete on a global level with the established toy companies whilst being based in the Northwest of Ireland.

 Since winning the competition our online sales on www.lottie.com are 3 times ahead compared to the same period last year, online now represents 50% of our business. I was hesitant before entering the competition as we are a product based company and how could we benefit from such a competition that surely was focused on IT based businesses, but when you think about it Google are helping businesses everyday from every part of the world no matter how remote or what industry to be found by their customers and who better to learn from. Since winning we have signed a worldwide book deal with Penguin, one of our dolls returned from space having spent 264 days on the international space station, we are close to signing off a major new investment and by this time next year we hope to double our current workforce to have 20 people employed in Donegal”.

Beutifi -  3rd Place 2016 - Richard Spence, Founder

“The Google Adopt a Start-up program provided BEUTiFi.com with the skills and tools to improve our user experience, understand the customer in much more detail and how to target and acquire them in a much more cost effective manner. The data we unlocked through being on the program contributed to improving our booking conversion by almost 70%”

TruckScience - 2nd place 2016, Sorcha O'Grady, Director, Sales & Marketing

The Google Adopt A Startup program has had a hugely positive impact on our business. The program has helped us to measure and improve all of the stages of our customer journey. In the 6 months since the program, we have acquired as many new customers for our Axle Weight Calculator as we did in the 3 years prior to the program. The PR from the program has also added greatly to our credibility, both locally and internationally.

FoodCloud - Winner H1 2015

Our Google Start-up team were very supportive and spent a lot of time learning about the work we do. They worked with us to develop a digital marketing strategy that would help us to raise awareness about the work we are doing in Ireland to tackle food waste.

Bizimply - 2nd Place 2015 - Mikey Cannon, Founder

"One of the biggest learnings for the team here at Bizimply was how Google has the tools to support a diverse digital marketing strategy. It's not just AdWords but display marketing, retargeting, website performance, social engagement, in email advertising, video and much more. Working closely with the team at Google to understand how to effectively use each one to suit our strategy was invaluable. The great thing about the programme was that it was not just focused on what you can do with Google. The focus was on establishing a digital strategy that worked for our company and where Google’s suite of tools could help. It allowed us to focus on creating a multi-channel marketing strategy that resonated with our target market. Since taking part in the programme we have put in place a much more focused digital strategy, which has allowed Bizimply to grow rapidly in the past 12 months. We would sincerely like to thank everyone involved in the programme particularly our 3 mentors Isabel Barajes, Pauline Farrelly and Cyrille Flom. We would encourage any startup to take part and benefit from the knowledge and advice of the team at Google."

Pundit Arena - Participant 2015, Ross O'Dwyer, Founder

“Our participation in Adopt a Startup began at a time when the company was raising its seed round and we received fantastic mentorship and made many valuable connections in Google. Since the programme we have continued to utilise the tools we learned to maintain a strategic outlook to all of our undertakings. I would certainly recommend this programme to startups both in Ireland and abroad.”