The Sunday Business PostJune 12, 201624 Done Deal

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By ElainE O’REgan

Intact Software, the Co Louth developer of fi-nancial and business management software for SMEs, has secured

investment of €1.9 million.The Dundalk-based firm

has secured €1.5 million from the newly launched Goodbody 2015 EIIS fund, managed by Hughes Blake, and a further €400,000 from Enterprise Ireland.

Intact will use the funding for sales and marketing, creat-ing 30 jobs over two years, and to develop a cloud-based ver-sion of iQ, the third generation ERP and financial manage-ment system it released three years ago.

“At the moment, Intact iQ is only offered on-premises, but in Australia and New Zealand, we’re seeing more demand for a cloud version, so we’ll launch that shortly,” said Jus-tin Lawless, chief executive of Intact Software.

“We’ve already taken on ten of the 30 new staff in the last six weeks and we’re also establishing a local presence in the British market ourselves.

“Traditionally we’ve been selling and servicing the product ourselves in Ireland. In Australia, New Zealand and Britain, Cyprus and Malta, we’ve sold through a network of channel partners.

“They resold the product and added their own mar-gin, but we’re looking to sell directly now in Britain.”

Intact has been in business since 1992. It has annual rev-enues of €5 million and em-

ploys 60 people at its Dundalk headquarters and offices in Omagh, Cork, Wicklow and Manchester.

“We plan to more than tri-ple our business over the next four years, so this investment is hugely significant,” said Lawless.

“It represents a big change. For a nearly 24-year old com-pany, this is the first time we’ve gone looking for ex-ternal funding to develop the business further.”

Intact’s clients include Ti-lestyle, Topline Group, Fane Valley Stores, Oxigen Environ-mental and Clear Pharmacy.

The investment in Intact is the first by the newly estab-lished Goodbody 2015 EIIS

Fund managed by Hughes Blake.

“We’re delighted to make this investment that will enable them to significantly grow their presence in the key UK market,” said Stephen Mc-Givern, partner, Hughes Blake.

“When the Intact team launched the Intact iQ product three years ago, they had the foresight to develop, from the ground up, a modern prod-uct that delivered an array of functionality at an affordable price for their SME custom-ers.”

Eugene F Collins acted as legal adviser to the Good-body 2015 EIIS Fund. Flynn O’Driscoll acted as legal ad-visor to Intact Software.

By POst REPORtER

Kildare dentist Patrick O’Brien has opened a 2,000 sq ft prac-tice in Naas in

response to rising demand among customers in Kildare, Carlow and Laois for services ranging from fillings and extractions to dentures and cosmetic procedures.

O’Brien raised €25,000 on Linked Finance, Ireland’s leading peer-to-peer lend-ing platform, to complete the fit-out of the new facility in Monread Leisure Centre, where he had been operat-ing from a smaller surgery since 2013.

“I have a 15-year lease on the new premises, which gives me the scope to look forward, so we have three surgeries and decent re-ception space with ample parking in a nice centre,” said O’Brien.

O’Brien established his first dental practice outside Dublin in Athy in 1997. Naas opened six years later, op-erating as part of doctor Philip Aherne’s medical practice in Monread Lei-sure Centre.

“When I opened initially in Naas, I knew that being located in a doctor’s practice would be a huge opportuni-ty and it gave me a feel for the potential success of the location and allowed me to dip my toe in the water,” said O’Brien.

With customers becoming better educated about dental care, O’Brien is seeing rising demand for cosmetic and high-end dentistry services, including implants.

A new implant surgeon will begin work at Monread Dental next month and O’Brien has also installed an orthopantomogram (OPG) scanner for panoramic den-tal X-rays of the upper and lower jaw.

“It’s a good time to be a dentist, there’s a lot of ex-citing work out there and we’re doing quite a lot of implants.

“People like to have the whole service on one site, including the surgery, where you place the implant, and the cosmetic element where

I take over to screw in the crown.”

O’Brien decided to raise money on Linked Finance, having read about the crowd-lending platform in a newspaper article.

“The experience was very good. They had me up and running with the finance before I could nearly even say boo,” he said.

“We were open just before Christmas and I had applied for the money in October. I had a builder who needed to get cracking on the project, so it was brilliant to be able to tell him that the money was there and he could get on with it.

“Generally, something like this would take four to five months to get over the line, but it was open within two months.

“This was one of the smoothest, most pleasant, experiences I’ve had opening a new surgery.”

Linked Finance and its 12,000 registered lenders are supporting growing SMEs across every industry sector, and in every county, looking to access finance for working capital to grow their businesses.

The thousands of lenders signed up with Linked Fi-nance plan to help finance the growth of up to 5,000 Irish SMEs to the tune of €250 million by the end of 2017.

For more details, see linked-finance.com

By ElainE O’REgan

Murphy Surveys, the Kildare-based survey-ing consultan-cy, will create

50 jobs within 18 months, having invested €2.5 million in new technologies, includ-ing drone and laser scanning equipment for geological work.

The company employs 200 people in Ireland and Britain, having created 50 jobs in two years. It has 120 staff in Ireland at its Kilcullen headquarters and offices in Dublin, Cork and Belfast.

In England and Scotland, where it has been operating since 2004, it employs 80 people at offices in London, Northwich and, most recently, Glasgow.

In the last year, Murphys has opened new divisions for drone or unmanned aerial vehicles and bridge inspection

services. It has seen work rise in the north of England, where its clients include Sellafield in Cumbria, and it has become the first company in Ireland to introduce 3D laser scanning for site mapping.

“We have developed our own in-house 3D surveying and CAD [computer-aid-ed design] modelling tech-niques,” said Ray Murphy, managing director, Murphy Surveys.

“Laser is a non-intrusive way of measuring that allows us to capture the environment completely and reduce poten-tial human error, because the measurements aren’t taken by hand.”

Murphy said the company’s continued investment in tech-nology had seen its share of the surveying market increase.

“In Ireland and Britain, we’re ahead of our compe-tition by quite a bit and that really stood to us during the

hard times, when our focus was on getting things done more efficiently,” he said.

“We have a growth path of £1 million this year out of London, but we are also win-ning contracts in the north of England.

“The companies behind the

technologies we use lean on us for advice during devel-opment. We also do an ele-ment of R&D ourselves and we’re working currently with Oxford University’s Robotics Department and the devel-opment labs at Dublin City University.”

Murphy Surveys’ Irish cli-ents include Intel, the Railway Procurement Agency, National Road Authority and Bord Gáis. In Britain, the company works with Crossrail, Network Rail and Thames Water.

Murphy Surveys won the Innovation in Construction prize at the recent Irish Con-struction Industry Awards for a tank scanning project led by its Cork office in Airport East Business Park.

The winning entry ex-amined the use of 3D laser scanning technology and geo-matics surveying in assessing the dimensional tolerances of steel storage tanks.

50 new hires as Murphy Surveys invests €2.5m

Monread launches crowning glory

Intact puts €1.9m behind cloud management software pitch

Company: Intact Software

Done Deal: €1.9m investment

The clincher: “We’re delighted to make this investment that will enable them to significantly grow their presence in the key UK market” - stephen Mcgivern, partner, Hughes Blake

Company: Monread Dental

Done deal: Launch of practice after €25,000 fit-out

The clincher: “It’s a good time to be a dentist, there’s a lot of exciting work out there and we’re doing quite a lot of implants. People like to have the whole service on one site” - Patrick O’Brien, dentist, Monread Dental

Company: Murphy Surveys

Done Deal: 50 new jobs

The clincher: “In Ireland and the UK, we’re ahead of our competition by quite a bit and that really stood to us during the hard times, when our focus was on getting things done more efficiently” - Ray Murphy, managing director, Murphy Surveys

Qpercom wins four deals✽ Qpercom has agreed four

deals this year with col-leges in Ireland and Britain, bringing annual revenues for the NUI Galway spin-out to €200,000.

Two colleges in Britain, the University of Sheffield and Manchester’s National School of Healthcare Sci-ences, have signed up to use the Qpercom’s electronic marking system.

The company has also developed a new assess-ment system for the College of Anaesthetists of Ireland, and has renewed an existing contract with NUI Galway’s College of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences.

Qpercom was spun-out of the school in 2008, hav-ing developed an electronic marking system for the practical exams used in third-level medical, nursing, dentistry and veterinary studies.

The system is used by 25 universities and professional bodies around the world, in-

cluding Dundee and St An-drews universities in Scot-land, Sweden’s Karolinksa Institutet and the National University of Singapore.

“We don’t sell software, we sell expertise in clin-ical skills assessment,” said Thomas Kropmans, co-founder and acting director of Qpercom, and senior lecturer in medical educational informatics at NUI Galway.

“When we started up sev-en years ago, we analysed the paper-based assessment that is done worldwide and we found 30 per cent of errors occurred in the pa-per-based versions of these observational exams.

“Forms were incompletely filled out and results were added up incorrectly. We can now actually look into the quality of the exams so universities can be far more sure of what is actu-ally happening in the deci-sion-making regarding the students that pass or fail.”

Movidius-Lenovo deal becomes a reality✽ Movidius, the Dub-

lin-founded technology firm, has agreed a deal to supply advanced vision processing technology to Lenovo.

The deal will see Leno-vo use Movidius’ Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit and custom computer vision algorithms for virtual reality (VR) projects.

Myriad 2 is an ultra-low power chip that can be used in handheld and head-worn devices for head-tracking, gesture-recognition, and blending multiple video streams into interactive VR video.

“Lenovo is building de-vices designed from the ground-up for VR,” said Remi El-Ouazzane, chief

executive, Movidius. “We’re very much looking

forward to these no-com-promise devices that will push VR adoption into the mainstream.” Founded 11 years ago, Movidius makes tiny, low-energy silicon chips. In March, the compa-ny announced a deal with drone company DJI, which will use its chips for new object-tracking and colli-sion-avoidance technology.

Movidius announced plans to double its work-force at the start of the year. Sean Mitchell, the compa-ny’s chief operating officer, said at the time that it was on course to “easily close to double” its workforce from 125 to 250 people over 18 months.

A&L launches Writer in Residence scheme

✽ A&L Goodbody is part-nering with Business to

Arts to launch a Writer in Residence programme un-der the Docklands Arts Fund in Dublin.

The partnership will see a writer work with children at St Joseph’s Co Ed Primary School in East Wall to de-velop their creativity and literacy skills. The venture marks the first time that a business in Ireland has engaged in a Writer in Res-idence programme with Business to Arts and Dublin City Council.

A&L Goodbody will pro-vide funding for the pro-gramme worth €30,000 over a three-year period.

Employees at the law firm’s Dublin office have been volunteering with ed-

ucation charity Suas for the past four years as part of a paired reading literacy sup-port programme for eight to 14-year-olds living in Dub-lin’s Docklands.

“This partnership builds and complements our on-going work with delivering similar projects such as Suas to boost literacy levels in our area,” said Julian Yarr, managing partner, A&L Goodbody.

“We look forward to continuing to support this important work over the next three years through the Writer in Residence programme, which creates an exciting new dimension in our work to engage and inspire children in our local community through litera-cy,” he said.

Andrew Hetherington, chief executive, Business to Arts and Julian Yarr, managing partner, A&L Goodbody with Cerys Duff, 7, from St Joseph’s Co Ed Primary School, Dublin

Raymond Murphy,

managing director,

Murphy Surveys

Patrick O’Brien has opened a new dental practice in Naas with the support of Linked Finance

Paul Marry, Intact Software; Stephen McGivern, Hughes Blake; Justin Lawless, chief executive, Intact Software; and Aidan Lawless, co-founder, Intact Software