Pioneering Irish AI business Webio raises €2.5m

A pioneer in the field of conversational AI, Webio’s latest funding round will help drive the continued growth of the business.

Dublin-headquartered AI business Webio has raised €2.5m in a funding round led by Hambro Perks Growth Debt Fund and which includes a further investment from Finch Capital, an existing investor.

This is Hambro Perks first Irish investment, providing €1.75 million of venture debt to Webio, a Dublin-based conversational AI specialist company. 

“Webio is a dynamic and exciting IP-rich company that we are thrilled to be backing, and we look forward to supporting their growth plans over the coming years”

Founded in Dublin in 2016 by Cormac O’Neill, Mark Oppermann and Paul Sweeney, Webio has its headquarters in Temple Bar in Dublin, with subsidiaries in the UK and Poland.

This is Hambro Perks first Irish investment, providing €1.75m of venture debt to Webio, a Dublin-based conversational AI specialist company.

Walking the talk

“We are delighted to be announcing this funding round and welcoming Hambro Perks to Team Webio,” said Cormac O’Neill, Webio CEO. 

“It’s a real endorsement of our strategy that Finch Capital are also participating in the round as we look to bring the benefits of our Conversational Al solutions to the credit and collections industry”. 

Webio is a specialist in credit, collections, and payment conversational messaging and has built its own propriety conversational technology specifically for the credit and collections industry. The Webio platform empowers customer engagement with conversational AI, using automated chatbots, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to deliver customer conversations in any digital messaging channel, personalised and at scale.

Acting as the ‘central intelligence hub’, Webio orchestrates all the elements needed to have successful customer journeys, enabling the credit industry to positively and empathetically engage indebted and vulnerable customers. The company is on a mission to rebalance the Credit, Collections and Payment ecosystem by reimagining how lenders engage and converse with customers.

The deal was led by Stephen Fahy of Hambro Perks Growth Debt Fund, which primarily supports European high-growth scale-up companies with non-dilutive growth capital, focusing on B2B SaaS and IP-rich advanced manufacturing companies in the UK and Ireland (HQ’d in London with an office at Dogpatch Labs in CHQ Buildings in Dublin). 

“Webio is a dynamic and exciting IP-rich company that we are thrilled to be backing, and we look forward to supporting their growth plans over the coming years,” said Fahy.

As well as Finch Capital and now Hambro Perks, Webio is also backed by Enterprise Ireland and the European Institute of Innovation & Technology, and the latest funding round will support the business’ ambitious plans for growth.

“Webio continues to solve real challenges in the Credit and Collections industry, and we are delighted to continue to support their expansion,” said Mike Brennan, partner, Finch Capital.

John Kennedy
Award-winning ThinkBusiness.ie editor John Kennedy is one of Ireland's most experienced business and technology journalists.

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