Tommy Kearns, CEO and co-founder. Image: Xtremepush
The digital marketing software company has offices in Ireland, the UK, eastern Europe and the US.
Dublin-headquartered Xtremepush is set to double its workforce in Ireland and overseas in the coming year, RTÉ reports.
From its headquarters in Ranelagh, Xtremepush has grown its digital market software company to include offices in the UK, US and eastern Europe. This international team is now set to reach 140 people with new roles to be created in software development, sales and marketing, finance, and operations.
Xtremepush’s plans for growth follow a fundraising of $33m. This includes equity funding from UK private equity firm Grafton Capital with the remainder from a refinanced debt facility.
CEO and co-founder Tommy Kearns said the investment would fuel expansion in overseas markets such as North America, the Middle East and Asia.
“Xtremepush is now in hyper-growth mode. We want to scale quickly in all of these markets, both organically and through strategic acquisitions,” said Kearns.
Indeed, the company saw a string of new offices launched across eastern Europe throughout 2019 and in early 2020 it officially launched a Turkey office at an event hosted by Enterprise Ireland.
Grafton Capital will now take a minority stake in the business with managing partner Edward Barroll Brown joining the Xtremepush board.
“We believe that Xtremepush is well positioned to grow as more and more businesses need to get smarter about how they engage their customers across multiple channels, whilst managing first-party data and privacy requirements in a fast-changing digital marketing environment,” said Barroll Brown.
Growth trajectory
Launched in 2014, Xtremepush featured as a Siliconrepublic.com Start-up of the Week the following year, shortly after reaching the final of Accenture’s inaugural FinTech Innovation Lab.
The company was founded by Kearns and CTO Dr Kevin Collins.
The SaaS company has built a platform that helps brands and marketers analyse, segment and target web and mobile app users with data-driven, contextually relevant and highly optimised notifications.
“This significant investment by Grafton Capital not only represents a cash injection, but also gives us access to their vast knowledge and experience in the growth-stage development of SaaS companies,” said Collins.
“This announcement is also very good news for the tech sector here in Ireland. It underscores our ability to compete internationally and to attract large global capital partners for digital enterprise services that are among the best in the world.”
In 2018, Xtremepush acquired UK email service provider Emailcenter. This acquisition doubled the team and Xtremepush announced plans for a further 20 new hires.
Last summer, Xtremepush acquired customer insight agency Alchemetrics, retaining all of its existing staff. Alchemetrics was headquartered in the UK with a team of developers in Vilnius, Lithuania.
In September, the company secured €4.25m in funding to support a global growth and acquisition strategy. At the time, an acquisition fund in the region of €15m was available to the business, with growth capital also earmarked for expansion of its teams in the US and Europe.
Xtremepush clients have included Bank of Ireland, AIB, McDonald’s, RTÉ and Oddschecker, the online gambling platform to be sold by Paddy Power Betfair owner Flutter for £155m.
The company grew out of the mobile app development business iMobile, which developed apps for Independent News & Media, Cars Ireland, Street Rugby and App King.
Updated, 13 July 2021 at 2.10pm: This article has been updated to include comments from Dr Kevin Collins.
