THE north’s innovation hub Catalyst has revealed firms graduating from its Springboard programme have attracted £90 million of equity investment over the past decade.
The Springboard initiative is geared at supporting ambitious early-stage companies by providing a tailored mentorship programme.
Applications are now being invited to be part of the programme in 2022.
Programme manager Paul Clancy said: “Over 100 companies have graduated from Springboard since its inception and those companies have raised more than £90m of equity funding and have created over 1,000 jobs in the local economy.
“We have been fortunate to be able to help leading NI companies like Plotbox, Cumulus Neuroscience and Cloudsmith at an early stage and the team has been delighted to see the progress of more recent graduates such as SustainIQ and Civic Dollars as they begin their journey to success.”
He added: “This level of funding ensures that NI companies are better equipped to tackle the global problems they have set out to solve and shows the growing interest from investors in the region.”
Springboard graduates Maria Diffley and Liam McEvoy, co-founders of environmental technology company SustainIQ, said: “At Sustain IQ, we have developed a software tool that helps companies improve how their business monitors, measures and reports on social, environmental and economic performance.
“Springboard helped us at a critical juncture of our business by providing us with mentorship and support to allow us to understand our pricing strategy and how to present our story. It also allowed us to become ‘investor ready’ and we were successful in raising our pre-seed funding at the start of 2021.”
