Buymie wins top gong at Fast 50 Awards 2022

Devan Hughes’ Buymie achieved 6,903% growth in the past four years.

Same day grocery delivery company, buymie, has emerged as the fastest growing technology company in this year’s Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Technology Awards.

The company has a network of over 400 personal shoppers that deliver groceries from Lidl, Dunnes Stores and Woodies in Ireland in as little as one hour.

“When we founded Buymie and I hit the road as the first personal shopper, Buymie knew the potential to augment the grocery industry with technology”

Buymie expanded to the UK earlier this year in partnership with ASDA. Buymie uses technology to bundle orders and routes to minimise both time and carbon impact and has seen growth of 6,903% in the last four years.

Ranking excellence

The Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards is one of Ireland’s foremost technology award programmes. It is a ranking of the country’s 50 fastest-growing technology companies based on revenue growth over a four-year period, and this year marks 23 years of the programme celebrating innovation and entrepreneurship in Ireland’s indigenous technology sector.

Reacting to the win, Devan Hughes, CEO and Co-Founder, Buymie said: “When we founded Buymie and I hit the road as the first personal shopper, Buymie knew the potential to augment the grocery industry with technology. To be now ranked as Ireland’s fastest-growing technology company is a testament to the incredibly hard work of our team and personal shoppers across Ireland, Armenia and the UK to build a highly scalable infrastructure. Since 2018 we’ve seen 6,900% growth in revenue. Gratitude is also due to our visionary retail partners Dunnes Stores, Lidl, and Asda, that have been on this journey with us and have played a huge part in our sustainable growth and helping us develop and trial new offerings.”  

Mail Metrics, which was 14th in last year’s ranking, moved up to second place in 2022. Its platform provides financial services companies with a solution to transform their regulatory and customer communications. The focus is on migrating customer correspondence to digital channels and reducing postal communications. This helps to improve the customer experience and increase regulatory compliance.

The top ten featured seven new entrants to the awards, among them third placed Reitigh Software which enables leading global financial services organisations to solve complex administration challenges with transparency and agility.

Fintech company Swoop placed forth and CEO and Founder Andrea Reynolds was awarded the Advocate for Women in Technology Award in association with Indeed. Swoop is a global platform supporting SMEs by bringing their business data into one place to garner insights and be instantly matched to eligible finance, as well as assess their spend on cost categories such as energy, banking and FX.

Top Irish tech firms record €500m in total annual revenues

woman holding award.

Andrea Reynolds, CEO and Founder Swoop. Picture: Jason Clarke

Cumulatively, the 2022 Fast 50 winners generated approximately €500m in total annual revenues and employed over 5,500 people in 2021. The average revenue of companies featured in the ranking was approximately €10 million, while the average growth rate of the companies over the last four years was 594%. The awards programme also saw 17 new entrants appearing on the ranking for the first time, seven of which were in the top 10. There was also an increase in the number of female CEOs in the ranking with seven organisations led by females.

This year’s ranking features companies from all four provinces with eight counties represented in the rankings. 29 companies are Leinster-based, eight are from Munster, nine are from Ulster, and there are four representatives from Connacht.

“Congratulations to all of the companies that ranked this year,” said David Shanahan, partner with Deloitte.

“As the business environment becomes more complex, the Irish technology sector has shown great resilience and tenacity. This year’s ranking shows growth across a broad range of sectors with companies coming up with innovative solutions to address changing consumer and business demands while faced with adversity. It’s also encouraging to see so many new entrants, including seven in the top ten. Despite the challenges of late, the Irish indigenous tech sector continues to succeed.”

In addition to announcing the ranking of the Fast 50 companies, the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 awards included a number of award categories. The winners of these awards this year were:

Scale Up Award in association with Scale Ireland

Winner: MCO (MyComplianceOffice)

This award recognises a company that has demonstrated an impressive ability to scale up or expand overseas over the last four years.

Innovative New Technology Award in association with Google

Winner: Thinscale

This award is for a company that has created or introduced a new or innovative product or service to international markets that has helped grow their business over the last four years.

Impact Award in association with Meta

Winner:  TEKenable

This award is for a company that has made a significant impact within the current year.

Advocate for Women in Technology Award in association with Indeed

Winner: Andrea Reynolds, CEO and Founder Swoop

This award will be given to an individual who has demonstrated through their actions that they are an advocate for increasing participation by and promotion of women in the technology sector.

Alumni Award

Winner: TransferMate

This award acknowledges a company that has played a major role in the Fast 50 programme to date. This year’s recipient, TransferMate, has featured four times in the ranking to date.

Main image at top: Devan Hughes, CEO and co-founder of Buyme, and David Shanahan, Partner, Deloitte. Picture Jason Clarke

John Kennedy
Award-winning ThinkBusiness.ie editor John Kennedy is one of Ireland's most experienced business and technology journalists.

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