By Business & Finance 
In our Ones to Watch section, we highlight some of the up and coming companies in Ireland. This week we feature Applaud.
What is it?
Applaud is the online marketplace for booking musicians. With clients in the wedding, corporate and festival markets to date, there has been a growing demand for live music acts at events. Soon to launch our automated website with an end to end bookings management system, Applaud currently provides access to an exhaustive directory of musicians, a secure payments solution and customisable profiles.
Riding the wave of digitalisation in the music industry, Applaud has partnered with Sound Training Productions, to provide affordable professional recording services to our performers to ensure they can get the content needed to maximise their bookings.
Who’s behind it?
At the helm of Applaud is our Founder and CEO, Luke Rynne Cullen. He is the current President of Trinity Orchestra and Live Music Officer for Trinity Ents. Luke is also an experienced freelance violinist that created Applaud through seeing first hand the plethora of problems afflicting the music industry.
Leading our product development is our CTO, Conor Clery. A full stack developer with experience in mobile applications, Conor has built a robust and intuitive system.
Supporting Applaud as an advisor is Patrick Monaghan, Product Director at Phorest Salon Software, a company that has recently finished a funding round of €20 million.
The award winning team have accolades that include winning the Trinity LaunchPad Sprints and the Trinity Entrepreneurial Society Dragons Den competitions. They are currently participating in the New Frontiers Programme in Dublin Institute of Technology’s Hothouse, and are also on the cohort of the Startup Boost Dublin programme. They have also recently completed the Trinity Blackstone LaunchBox business accelerator program.
How is it funded?
Applaud is currently on the New Frontiers Programme in DIT HotHouse. We have also secured funding through winning the Trinity Entrepreneurial Society Dragons Den competition this year, as well as receiving funding from the Trinity Blackstone LaunchBox business accelerator.
Applaud is currently beginning to raise a seed round of €800,000 to accelerate our development and client acquisition.
Future plans?
Applaud aims to take part in the Techstars Los Angeles Music Accelerator to help accelerate and scale the company. With the imminent launch of our website, our plans are to finalise our seed round and move to the UK. There we will begin to utilize our playbook for expansion to professionalise and digitalise the grassroots of the music industry worldwide.
