Enterprise Ireland’s Start-Up Day 2026 took place in Dublin’s Aviva Stadium last week. At the event, which was attended by more than 650 founders, investors and other delegates, it was announced that Enterprise Ireland had invested €32.9 million in 198 Irish start-ups during 2025 through the High Potential Start-Up and Pre-Seed Start Fund (PSSF) programmes.
“The event was an opportunity for us to celebrate some of the top start-up companies in the country and to showcase their achievements,” says Enterprise Ireland head of start-ups Conor O’Donovan. “It’s also an opportunity for founders to engage with other players in the start-up ecosystem and with potential investors.”
Also announced on the day were details of the establishment of a new National Accelerator Programme, with a budget of €21 million over the next three years, as successor to the National Digital Research Centre. Enterprise Ireland will shortly be seeking applications of interest from operating bodies through a formal tender process.
“We’ve listened closely to founders who have told us they need early access to capital, experienced mentors, specialist expertise, and international markets and investors,” says O’Donovan. “The Startup Ireland National Accelerator tender will deliver best-in-class accelerator and training supports, with a strong focus on native AI, emerging technologies and specialist sectors, broader regional coverage, and fast-tracked access funding and international markets.”
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Once again, one of the highlights of the day was a pitching competition involving some of Ireland’s most innovative spin-out companies from the third-level research system supported by Enterprise Ireland’s commercialisation fund. These included biopharma buffer solutions provider ChromWatch, cybersecurity tools developer Ailtire, AI-driven digital health company MetHealth, and MicroJect which has developed a simpler way to deliver medicine through the skin.
The winning pitch was made by Maeve McCarthy, chief technology officer of medtech company Substrato Medical, which is developing novel tissue repair technology. The company will go on to participate in a European market access programme.
Along with the pitching competition, the event featured two panel discussions, one on starting and accelerating at the very early stages of a company’s development and the other on scaling.
In terms of funding support for both early-stage and scaling companies, Enterprise Ireland invested almost €50 million across 275 Irish firms in 2025, marking an increase of about 14 per cent on the previous year. These companies collectively raised total investment of more than €250 million.
Individual Enterprise Ireland investments ranged from €100,000 to €2 million, reflecting the agency’s new investment strategy. This approach moves beyond early-stage funding to multistage investing, enabling larger funding rounds and providing greater support for scaling companies.
“Founders are exhibiting ambition to scale, go global and enter new markets from the very outset,” says O’Donovan. “Artificial intelligence is having a significant impact. We are seeing more and more start-ups using AI tools to innovate new propositions, accelerate prototyping and get to a minimum viable product very quickly.”
Supporting start-ups goes far beyond funding. “Last year, we spoke to around 600 founders from all regions of the country to understand the challenges they are facing in growing their businesses and how we can help them to overcome them. That means assisting them in terms of navigating the support system, accessing funding and investment, increasing their international footprint quickly, helping them to identify market opportunities and avail of them, and much else. We want to ensure that we are deploying [the] right kind of supports for the next wave of founders, particularly in the AI world, where things are moving so rapidly.”
Among those supports being deployed is a new partnership with 500 Global, one of the largest accelerators and venture capital investors in the US. This gives Enterprise Ireland-supported companies access to the 500 Global flagship accelerator in Silicon Valley.
Very importantly, some 55 female-led start-ups were supported during 2025. This included 36 early-stage funding rounds under the PSSF compared to eight in 2024, demonstrating the growing demand for this support among women founders.
Again, it’s about more of that finance. “We looked at barriers facing female founders and launched the NextWave: National Women Founders Accelerator to help to address them,” says O’Donovan.
The 10-week NextWave programme is designed exclusively for women founders and aims to empower women founders to validate, build, and scale with confidence. Through a mix of structured learning, mentorship, and peer connection, participants validate their ideas, refine narratives, and build momentum toward investor readiness.
“The programme has been hugely oversubscribed,” O’Donovan notes. “It’s designed around what women founders want and need and how they want it delivered.”
Looking ahead, O’Donovan says Enterprise Ireland has a target of supporting the creation of 1,000 new start-ups by 2029. “That’s our strategic ambition. We had about 2,500 inquiries from potential founders last year in relation to start-up supports. It’s more important than ever to support innovative indigenous Irish companies for the future health of the economy.”
