By Business & Finance 
Rhona Togher, co-founder and CEO, Restored Hearing; Andrew Mullaney, co-founder and CTO, NewsWhip; Eimear O’Carroll, co-founder and CTO, Restored Hearing; Paul Quigley, co-founder and CEO, NewsWhip.
Irish start-ups are making waves beyond our shores with NewsWhip and Restored Hearing announcing that they have won places on the Blackbox Connect accelerator programme in Silicon Valley.
Blackbox Connect takes the best young companies from all over the world and brings them to Palo Alto for two weeks to meet with investors, develop relationships in the Silicon Valley ecosystem and launch into the wider US market. The programme is sponsored by Google4Entrepreneurs. Enterprise Ireland is also backing both Irish companies attending the programme.
Rhona Togher, CEO of Restored Hearing, said: “The US is our main market so getting to work with Silicon Valley experts to develop our business there is amazingly advantageous for us. We’re hoping that by working with Blackbox Connect we can start to build relationships with partners and retailers in the US.
We’ve experienced great traction online with most of our customers hailing from America so we’re excited to bring Sound Relief tinnitus sound therapy player to stores over there as soon as possible.”
Restored Hearing alleviates and prevents tinnitus, also known as ringing in the ears. Their tinnitus sound therapy, Sound Relief, is clinically proven to reduce the effects of tinnitus and is entirely delivered online on restoredhearing.com. Founded in 2009 by Rhona Togher and Eimear O’ Carroll their young and rapidly expanding team is increasingly winning business in overseas markets and with big retailers.
NewsWhip reveals the stories that are changing the world each day. It continuously tracks the spread of millions of news stories, videos, pictures, and other content attracting engagement on social networks. NewsWhip technology is used by over 60% of the most shared publishers, including BuzzFeed, NBC, BBC, AoL and Bloomberg, and is also used by PR firms, marketers and communications departments. Andrew Mullaney, co-founder of NewsWhip said: “This springboard comes at a perfect time for us. We’ve just opened our office in New York and it’s off to a roaring start, with dozens of new clients and relationships. Now we’re interested in exploring the west coast for both investment and business development.”
