October 2011 Big Ideas from NUI Galway Attract Attention from Investors

An Enterprise Ireland event to showcase 120 ‘Big Ideas’ was opened by the Minister for Research and Innovation, Sean Sherlock on Monday, 10 October in the Convention Centre, Dublin.

17 of the 120 inventions developed by publicly-funded researchers emerged from NUI Galway. One of these inventions is at the core of a new company called seevl ltd. This company developed technology to mine the Web to provide detailed information on artists and their music to online listeners, and let them discover music they will love.

seevl is already being used in a browser extension of YouTube. Recent figures show a large user base of people listening to music online with the YouTube VEVO channel reaching 60 million unique visitors in July 2011. With Enterprise Ireland’s assistance seevl was established by Alexandre Passant and his fellow music-lovers as a spin-out from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway earlier this year.

According to Alexandre Passant: “It has been a thrill just getting this company off the ground, and then to have such feedback, and participate in Big Ideas only five months after the public launch of the start-up. Big Ideas was an ideal showcase for us in terms of industry contacts, and we are delighted by the support given to us by Enterprise Ireland and DERI. Galway is a real hotbed of innovation and technology, and we are delighted to be part of this vibrant space.”

Opening the event and announcing the winners of the Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation Awards, Minister Sherlock said: “It is exciting, highly encouraging and very promising for the future to see such a range of high end technologies emerging from publicly-funded research. I am delighted to see that many of the Big Ideas being presented to the investor community today have the potential to become vibrant new companies.”

The Minister added: “Enterprise Ireland and the Higher Education Institutes working together have built 185 spin-out companies from State-funded research to date. Besides creating jobs, it is uplifting to see that many of the “Big Ideas” can help people here in Ireland and across the globe with health and lifestyle issues.

The Big Ideas event is the largest annual gathering of inventors and investors in the country. 120 new technologies being developed for the marketplace, will be unveiled and, of these the promoters of 18 ‘investor ready’ technologies will be vying for the attention of 200 potential investors attending the event. The ‘Big Ideas’ Showcase is a key event funded by the Government to help develop publicly-funded research into new companies, technologies and services.

Feargal Ó Móráin, Executive Director of Enterprise Ireland said: “the focus of the Big Ideas event is to get some deals done between the inventors and investors during the 150 one-to-one meetings which will take place. Enterprise Ireland, in partnership with the Higher Education Institutes, is providing the right environment for investors to explore options to either licence these new technologies from researchers or use them as the basis to form new companies in the energy, life sciences, medical, engineering and IT sectors”.

While the Irish system for transferring technology from Third Level Education Institutes into industry is relatively new, the outputs compare favourably with the latest available data from the US and EU authorities in this area – Ireland is creating four spin-outs per $100m invested by the State compared to two in Europe and one in the US.

The Minister presented Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation Awards to three companies that showcased their technologies at similar events in the past and have since successfully established a spin-out company.

ENDS