By Business & Finance 
Niamh Bushnell, Founder and CEO, TechIreland
TechIreland released its 2017 Funding Review, a report which breaks down Irish tech company funding over the last 12 months.
The data has tracked €580.2 million across 1,641 companies, 313 multinationals, 207 global investors in Ireland, 13 innovation sectors and a host of domains such as artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and the blockchain.
Per quarter funding showed huge figures dished out to Arralis, the Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs) company (€50 million in Q1); Iterum Therapeutics (€59.5 million in Q2); Cubic Telecom (€40 million in Q3); and TransferMate (€30 million in Q4).
According to TechIreland‘s data, the health and medical sector was the most funded in 2017 (31%). In Q2 alone it took 50% of the overall investment.
‘Brilliant Female Founders’ (BFF) amassed €79.4 million of funding in 2017, with Global Shares (€4.5 million in Q1), MadeMe (€1.3 million in Q2), Tandem HR Solutions (€1.3 million in Q3) and TransferMate (€30 million in Q4) seeing the biggest gains.
Some of the most talked-about and emerging technologies were referenced in the review, including AI, VR, the blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT) and Software as a Service (SaaS):
Out of 78 AI companies, 24 were funded, with a total of €79.4 million; four VR companies out of 17 saw funding of €4.5 million; two of out 12 blockchain firms received €550,000 worth of investment; 15 out of 116 IoT firms were met with €105.7 million of funding; and 34 out of 263 SaaS companies obtained €61 million of funding.
Nine companies in total in Q4 received funding of €2 million or more, with four of these founded by women (TransferMate, Nuritas, GC Aesthetics and VideoDoc).
In 2017, 183 companies were funded with 113 of them founded in the last five years.
The report, in its entirety, including TechIreland and Irish Venture Capital Association (IVCA) funding comparisons, can be downloaded on the TechIreland website.
