Ones to Watch: Veri

Ann-Marie Mc Sorley, Founder, Veri (Photo: Shane O’Neill, SON Photographic)

In our Ones to Watch section, we highlight some of the top movers and shakers in Ireland. This week we feature Veri.

What is it?

Veri streamlines and digitises the nightmare that is training compliance records. Currently on construction sites, hospitals and skills-based businesses, training requires a paper trail for historic and on-the-job training that is often chaotic but mandatory for regulatory audit evidence.

The cost of mandatory training and its compliance is huge, normally with full-time members of admin staff and management hours with no evidence of a return on the investment in the training, just boxes of files.

Veri can save up to 30% of administration costs using its automations and reducing duplication. In addition to risks of litigation, governance and a focus on quality, other drivers for Veri are complying with industry watchdogs or legislation such as the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Veri has also been built under the strictest data protection compliance principles, as GDPR legislation looms in April, a huge issue for all providers of training. The personal information held will be subject to access requests and needs to have role-based access, all of which Veri supports, unlike Excel or paper.

Veri replaces spreadsheets and paper forms. Its modular format ensures training delivery can be benchmarked to track quality. milestones, skills, feedback and outcomes in real time via a simple mobile app that can be customised to the company’s internal training or external sub-contractor. This data is viewable in custom reports or as an aggregate in data analytics to remediate problems quicker and ensure better return on training investment.

Who’s behind it?

Veri’s founder, after 20 years of buying, delivering and managing training, CEO Ann-Marie Mc Sorley decided that there had to be a safer, cheaper and better way of tracking and tracing training outcomes for training audits and reporting. As well as owning her own training company, Ann-Marie was commercial director of the €1 million Odyssey Arena event NIIHS. She worked with the NSPCC, local councils in NI and delivered programmes for the Oireachtas and the Ombudsman for Children.

Blue Chip Technology and CTO Shane Barron worked with Veri’s first beta clients Barrow Training & Consultancy (the first ISO 2015-accredited training company in Ireland) to develop the platform over 12 months after Mc Sorley developed a MVP for her own training company.

Shane’s CV includes an array of tech start-up success, including working as a Senior Developer with Bluefin Payment Solutions, a fintech multinational-based in Waterford; Lead Developer with Hostelworld.com, one of Ireland’s most successful IPOs; and Senior Developer with Sonru, the trusted global leader and pioneer of automated video interviewing.

Michael Connole has recently joined the board as a Director at Veri develops training compliance tools for healthcare markets. With 30 years’ experience in health, Michael founded and sold Teckno Surgical and after its sale went on to be MD with buyers SISK Healthcare‘s Cardiac Services and Teckno.

How is it funded?

The company was bootstrapped to launch the first version in October 2016. In January 2017 it secured the Female Competitive Start Fund (CSF) from Enterprise Ireland, giving them 10% of the equity.

The CSF really was a turning point for Veri, allowing the company to employ CTO Shane full time. The momentum CSF created enabled Veri’s simple mobile solution, closing a deal with the National Learning Network making it a great 2017 where they won Google Adopt a Startup. In July 2017 the limited company Fioru Software Solutions closed a round of funding with EI match private EIS investment of €400,000.

Future plans?

Veri is pushing forward with ensuring that every user, be they an employee/student, foreman/supervisor or administrator/QA manager, enjoys a seamless experience.

Data protection is a big focus for us in 2018, as the needs of those who manage training records for large numbers of people will be huge. We have developed a subject access request tool, that will take the pain out of employee or students’ rights to request information from companies.

We are also working with artificial intelligence around tracking training outcomes versus audit results, to further track and prescribe remediation for problem areas in regulated skills-based working environments.

Northern Ireland is also a big focus as Veri currently has associates working with clients in the six counties and have a base in Belfast.