Venture capital investment into Irish companies declined slightly last year, new data shows, despite a strong end to the year.
The decline came against the background of a challenging funding environment, the latest KPMG Venture Pulse reported, with global conflicts, geopolitical tensions, major elections and a lack of IPOs weighing on sentiment.
Total investment for the year was 18 per cent lower at $627.75 million (€611 million) across 98 deals.
This was despite a 5 per cent rise in global venture capital investment, from $349.4 billion in 2023 to $368.3 billion last year. The number of global deals declined, however, to 35,684 in 2024 from 43,320 a year earlier. That marked a seven-year low in volume.
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Despite the challenges of 2024, there is optimism for the Irish venture capital market in the year ahead, as activity increased in the final months of 2024 followed by a strong start to the new year. Twenty-nine deals closed in the final three months of the year, with a value of $255.16 million, a rise of 46 per cent year on year.
Among those deals was the $48 million Series A raised by Dublin-based travel tech infrastructure start-up Nuitée and Nuritas’s $42 million Series C funding round.
Investor interest was spread across a number of sectors, with health, biotech and fintech gaining investment alongside AI, which was characterised by deals at the earlier stages.
Globally, investment rose from $84.5 billion across more than 8,500 deals in the third quarter of 2024 to $108.6 billion, a 10-quarter high, across 7,022 deals in the final three months of the year.
[ Venture capital funding for small and medium tech businesses rises 1%Opens in new window ]
In Ireland, there has been a strong start to 2025, with some deals raising more than $100 million each – including Fire1′s $120 million to fund trials for its monitoring device aimed at heart failure patients and the $118 million that XOcean has raised to boost global growth.
“A strong end to 2024 and a positive start to 2025 underscore the resilience of Ireland’s innovation ecosystem amidst global funding pressures and show confidence is returning to the market,” said Anna Scally, EMA region head of technology, media and telecoms and partner at KPMG in Ireland.
“Health, biotech and fintech are still seeing interest. AI is really starting to attract interest. While the AI deal sizes are quite small here, it’s an area likely to grow significantly over the next year. With the first set of requirements in the EU AI Act going into effect on February 2nd, companies will have to factor the provisions of this Act into how they develop AI products and services to be rolled out in the European market.”
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