Podcast Ep 247: RDI Hub CEO Liam Cronin on how a start-up community on Europe’s western edge is motivated to scale and grow.
It must have been another one of many ‘field of dreams’ or ‘build it and they will come’ moments for Brian McCarthy to create the RDI Hub in Killorglin. The vision was the right one because the Hub has flourished, and within just five years €250m worth of investment has been raised by start-ups located there.
You see, the truth about Ireland is innovation can come from anywhere on the island – you just need to make it happen – but mindset-wise there is still an endless drift to the east and the more populous regions of the country.
“It’s the building, it’s the community and it’s an ethos of helping each other. Everyone is on the same journey”
This trend can be bucked, as proven by Fexco founder McCarthy when he created a payments and foreign exchange business in 1981 in Killorglin from what must have seemed to many to be an unlikely location at the time to his critics. In the years since the Kerry business has grown to employ more than 2,600 people serving 50 markets worldwide.
The same ‘why not’ thinking must have applied five years ago when McCarthy struck again by offering 17,000 sq ft of space to grow a start-up hub for the south-west.
In recent weeks the RDI Hub marked its fifth anniversary and within that relatively short period of time has seen more than €250m invested in its start-ups and has created 430 high-quality local jobs.
We spoke with the CEO of RDI Hub Liam Cronin about how the hub has made the impact it has and what other regions of Ireland can learn from this.
The pillars for scaling and growing
Cronin speaks in a very matter of fact way about how the RDI Hub did so much in just a relatively short time. Everything, he said, was formulated in a pragmatic and logical way for a region on the edge of the Atlantic ocean. “The RDI Hub is a public-private partnership between Fexco, a fintech company on the south west coast of Ireland, Munster Technological University who are our research partner, and Kerry County Council from a local government perspective. It is fundd through Enterprise Ireland’s Regional Enterprise Development Fund.
“The whole objective and vision of the RDI Hub is to support start-ups, scale-ups and SMEs and corporates to scale and grow, create new products and services that lead to technology jobs in the south west of Ireland.
“We develop programmes first for students, start-ups and scale-ups to help them get to get to pillar two, to scale and grow which we do through our events and mentoring. Connecting industry and academia is the key element of what we do. And then we have the 20,000 sq ft building in the RDI Hub which has 150 desks, a 50-seater event space, a digital media lab. And we try to build off the regional strengths of fintech with Fexco.
“We’re surrounded by tourism, tech and we do a lot of work in the areas of sustainability and smart manufacturing.
“Where it all started was the vision of the founder of Fexco Brian McCarthy who really wanted to support the community in the south west and help companies to scale and grow and help people that had ideas with a location and a space and wraparound services, so ultimately he could find the next Fexco.”
The south western area of Ireland that has spawned Fexco is geographically not too far removed from places like Kinsale where in recent years another fintech was spawned called Global Shares, which was acquired in recent years by banking giant JP Morgan for a rumoured several hundred million euros.
Cronin says the south west has many examples of local start-ups with a global vision. “I’ve been working at the RDI Hub for the last five years and what I have observed is Kerry is a very entrepreneurial county.”
He name-checked businesses like food giant Kerry Group, fintech Taxamo, a spinout from Fexco that had been acquired for more than $200m in 2021, Stockbyte’s Jerry Kennelly, scaling pharma business Astellas and he pointed to more recent successes like Graphite Note, a start-up that emerged from the RDI Hub when it was co-founded by Hrovje Smolic and his former RDI Hub mentor Vinnie Lynch. Cronin also cited Glencar Construction, which is expanding rapidly across Europe.
“The whole objective is to help individuals that have an acorn of an idea and basically bring it forward by providing those wraparound services. It is having somebody like Hugh Reynolds, our entrepreneur-in-residents who has had three exits with companies like Havok and DemonWare back in the day, and it’s the support that the RDI Hub staff provide.
“It’s the building, it’s the community and it’s an ethos of helping each other. Everyone is on the same journey. If one company is fundraising, another might have just done that can will share their expertise. So a lot of what we’re doing is building that kind of community, allowing those collisions to happen and those water cooler moments where people come together and help each other.”
The RDI Hub was founded just months before the world went into Covid lockdown, which must have been challenging enough. But there were also fortunate coincidences like the restructuring of the NDRC into a nationwide consortium led from Dogpatch Labs along with Porterhouse in Galway and Republic of Work in Cork, but with a real all-island ethos to support entrepreneurs.
In essence, the creation of the hub at the time that it was founded is one of those happy coincidences that has worked for the south west.
Over the course of the five years some 70 new products and services have been launched by RDI companies.
In addition, more than 10,000 people have attended its training programmes. These include the AI summer School, NDRC and Skillnet Innovation Exchange as well as providing STEM education to more than 500 female secondary school students from across Munster in 2024 as part of the STEM Passport for Inclusion, run in association with the RDI Hub, Fexco, Maynooth University, Microsoft and Munster Technological University.
Coinciding with the fifth anniversary celebrations, it also emerged that Enterprise Ireland and the RDI Hub are embarking on a €1m Smart Regions AI Navigator Programme. It is envisaged the programme will enable SMEs to adopt and implement artificial intelligence solutions. The Smart Regions AI Navigator programme is co-funded by the Government of Ireland and the European Union through the Southern, Eastern & Midland Regional Programme 2021-2027.
For Cronin, innovation can certainly come from anywhere on the island but it is about regions fully playing to their strengths. “We’ve adopted a hub and spoke model. For example, later this month we will hold a Founder’s Weekend in Limerick where start-ups from Kerry, Limerick and Clare will come together to work on their start-up ideas. We select 20 companies to go on a pre-accelerator each quarter. And some of those will go and get on a paid accelerator. The master classes that are provided by NDRC are all about supporting the ecosystem to support these start-ups and that’s been fantastic. In December we had 20 companies pitching to more than 20 angel investors and it was great to see deals coming out of that.
“Whether you are in Killorglin, Galway or Kerry or wherever you are, the same level of supports are there. It has led to innovative companies like Taxamo and others that have really come out of the regions.
“We need to support the start-ups and scale-ups and hopefully turn them into large SMEs and employers of the future. It’s definitely happening and it’s great to see.”
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