Former University of Limerick colleagues secure key investment
Six figure investment for AI business from programme which backed Stripe and Airbnb
TWO former University of Limerick students have secured more than $620,000 in investment funding for a new artificial intelligence (AI) firm.
Rhebogue man Ryan Morrissey and Cork’s Bence Redmond, who met at UL’s immersive software engineering programme, have together come up with their company, Blueprints.
The program allows a user to predict what they think will happen in the world, and using that information, it decides when to buy or sell things like company shares to try and make money.
The pair received funding for their firm from NDRC, Ireland’s top start-up accelerator, which helps new companies grow faster than they could on their own.
Mr Morrissey and Mr Redmond are the youngest entrants receiving funding from NDRC this year.
They also received money from Y Combinator, one of the world’s best-known start-up financiers, based in Silicon Valley, which in the past has backed Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Reddit, Coinbase and Instacart.
It is these investments which have seen the two founders quit UL to work on their company full-time.
Mr Morrissey, who studied at St Clement’s College before going to UL to join the immersive course started by John and Patrick Collison said: “Prediction markets reward genuine knowledge. If you understand something deeply – geopolitics, sport, an industry – you can put that insight to work in a way that isn’t possible somewhere else. We built Blueprints so people can act on what they know.”
The idea for Blueprints took shape during co-founder Mr Morrissey’s internship at Stripe – which was founded by Limerick’s Collison brothers, both former Castletroy College students.