Aisling O’Neill, manager of Arclabs at WIT, with Klearcom CEO Liam Dunne. Image: Patrick Browne
Klearcom provides software to help companies recover from contact centre outages.
Customer care software provider Klearcom has taken home the top prize of €25,000 at the NDRC at ArcLabs Investor Showcase.
The Waterford-based company, founded by serial entrepreneur Liam Dunne, provides software to help companies prevent and recover faster from contact centre outages.
The showcase marked the end of an accelerator programme run by the Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) ArcLabs innovation hub and NDRC. The programme began in 2018, and this was the third and final NDRC at ArcLabs Investor Showcase. Previous winners of the showcase include regtech start-up Miura and cost management software LiveCosts.
Klearcom saw off five other businesses to take home the top prize on Friday (27 November). Other pitches on the day included tech start-ups in the areas of HR, research, hate speech and medtech.
“It wasn’t a straightforward task, choosing this year’s winner,” said Ben Hurley, CEO of NDRC and judge at the showcase.
“The businesses all presented a very interesting variety of propositions, with well-qualified teams involved. However, for Klearcom, what stood out was the strong experience of the founders. A great passion and energy, with the team’s journey built on experience and a very clear product-market fit.”
Start-ups in the south-east
This was the first entirely remote NDRC at ArcLabs programme, due to Covid-19 restrictions. As well as Klearcom, participating companies included:
- Kanary, which helps platforms identify hateful content posted by users
- Heal Air, which has developed smart infection-control technology to help private care homes reduce staff and patient illnesses
- Survey tool OpinionX, which is focused on the research space
- AutoPlan, which helps architects deliver planning applications faster by reducing the need for manual tasks
- AI-driven employee relations technology PluAuto, which is automating HR support functions
Aisling O’Neill, manager at ArcLabs, said that the hub’s location near WIT’s ICT research group and Enterprise Ireland’s Technology Gateway makes it the “best place to launch and grow your digital technology business”.
Based on WIT’s west campus, ArcLabs was established in 2005 to create an entrepreneurship and innovation hub. This time last year, a new €2.5m extension at ArcLabs was unveiled, doubling the size of the facility.
