Irish startup funding holds steady at €992m but scale-up gap widens
Irish startups raised €992 million across 319 companies in 2025, according to the latest TechIreland Irish Startup Funding Review, supported by Enterprise Ireland. While the headline figure represents a modest increase from €978 million in 2024, the data reveals growing challenges for founders seeking growth capital beyond seed stage.
The strongest funding performance came in the first quarter of 2025, when 69 companies secured €616 million, making it the largest quarter for Irish startup fundraising in a decade. However, momentum slowed significantly thereafter, with just €376 million raised across the remaining three quarters of the year.
The figures also show that funding remains highly concentrated. Four companies — LetsGetChecked (€150 million), XOCEAN (€115 million), Tines (€114 million) and ProVerum (€73 million) — accounted for almost half of all funding raised during the year.
For early-stage founders, the picture remains positive. A record 211 companies secured funding rounds of less than €1 million, supported in large part by Enterprise Ireland’s Pre-Seed Start Fund and High Potential Start-Up programmes. Enterprise Ireland supported 198 startups during the year and invested €32.9 million through these initiatives.
The challenge emerges at Series A and beyond. While the number of €1 million to €5 million rounds increased to 58, funding activity in the €5 million to €30 million range fell back to pre-2019 levels. TechIreland’s analysis highlights a persistent gap in Ireland’s scale-up funding environment, raising concerns about the ability of indigenous companies to compete internationally as they grow.
Sector performance remained uneven. Life sciences dominated fundraising, attracting more than half of all capital raised in 2025. Enterprise software and fintech followed as the second and third strongest sectors. In contrast, Energy and CleanTech experienced a sharp decline, with funding falling from €328 million in 2024 to just €41 million in 2025.
Regional startup activity remained strong despite Dublin’s continued dominance. Dublin-based companies raised €667.5 million across 192 companies, representing 67% of total investment value. Outside the capital, companies secured €210.1 million, with Galway, Louth, Wicklow and Cork among the strongest-performing regional ecosystems. Northern Ireland startups raised more than €114 million, with Antrim accounting for the majority of that activity.
Female-founded companies raised €146 million across 92 companies, representing approximately 15% of total funding. While unchanged from the previous year, the figure remains higher than many international markets where female founders secure a significantly smaller share of available venture capital.
For proptech, construction technology and climate technology founders, the data suggests a changing fundraising environment. Early-stage capital remains accessible, particularly through state-backed programmes, but larger institutional rounds are becoming increasingly competitive. The concentration of investment into a small number of large deals and the decline in growth-stage funding indicate that founders will need stronger commercial traction, clearer routes to profitability and broader international investor engagement to secure follow-on funding.
Ireland continues to produce startups at scale, but turning those startups into globally competitive scale-ups remains the ecosystem’s greatest challenge.