As geopolitics hits markets and AI reshapes company valuations, Scale Ireland and JP Morgan recently brought together founders and investors to discuss navigating capital market turbulence.
Despite the optimism that a beautiful sunny spring morning in Dublin normally brings, one could not shake the foreboding feeling that something’s not right in tech – a sector known for its bouts of boundless confidence – or in business generally.
The core message at the recent Scale Ireland and JP Morgan event – titled ‘The CFO Playbook: Capital, Runway, and Investor Communications in Uncertain Times’ – was that Ireland’s scaling tech companies now face a far more demanding fundraising environment than at any point in recent years.
Why? Well there’s the geopolitical uncertainty caused by events in the Middle East allied with the rapid advances of artificial intelligence (AI), creating a perfect storm that is forcing a fundamental rethink of how growth businesses are built, valued and sold.
The mood was candid, serious and sobering, but experienced hands also made it clear that prepared companies still have options.
Fail to prepare, prepare to fail
“Finance is our number one issue,” said Scale Ireland CEO Martina Fitzgerald. “A report last year identified a €1.1bn finance gap in Ireland over three to five years and many fund managers believe it is much bigger than that.”
She called for urgent reform to incentivise pension fund participation in indigenous Irish companies, citing France’s success in unlocking €14bn for domestic tech businesses through a targeted State scheme.
JP Morgan’s Grégoire Pennec, who leads EMEA Innovation Economy Mergers & Acquisitions at the US banking giant, told the audience that deal activity in European technology remains alive but that the terms of engagement have shifted considerably. The window is open, he said, but only for companies that have done the groundwork.
“Deals are happening fast, but they are becoming known in preparation for nine years, not nine months.”
He pointed to a structural change in how acquirers are thinking about their target companies, driven largely by the pace of AI development. 18 months ago buyers were focused on data ownership and systems of record but that framing has been overtaken by something new.
“The narrative and thinking around what is the best moat is evolving towards the system of action, meaning that you have to be embedded into your customers’ workflow in order to have the most defensible position.”
He also drew attention to the pressure building on traditional software pricing. The per-seat subscription model, long the backbone of SaaS revenue, is increasingly seen by buyers and investors as a legacy approach.
Scale is now a prerequisite rather than an advantage, he argued. “Getting to scale fast is very important. Scale is now the new barrier to entry. Investor mindshare, being on the forefront of AI recruitment, talent recruitment, having access to compute, these are increasingly concentrated into a few companies, and those companies are the consolidators.”
Pennec’s sobering analysis was followed by a panel discussion involving Karen May, CFO of XOCEAN, Nicola McClafferty from Molten Ventures, ISIF Senior Investment Director Brian O’Connor, Susan O’Coinne, CFO of ProVerum and Conor Quaine, CFO, CitySwift.
From this panel one thing was clear: the need to build genuine resilience into financial planning rather than treating uncertainty as a temporary condition to be waited out.
Susan O’Coinne, the CFO of ProVerum, an Irish medical device company specialising in minimally invasive treatments for prostate that raised $80 million (€68.6M) in Series B funding in late 2025 to accelerate global commercialisation, emphasised the work involved in closing such an investment.
“To close a Series B in this context takes a lot of preparation and building relationships with the investors in advance.
“It’s all about open communication, regularly keeping them updated … making sure they get aligned with your message.”
XOCEAN’s Karen May described how the business, which operates uncrewed surface vessels for ocean data collection, had to navigate a sharp reversal in its offshore renewables market two years ago because a shift in sentiment towards climate investment caused many clients to scale back projects.
To counter this the swiftly business pivoted to telecoms and interconnectors, areas that have experienced strong demand from the growth of data centres and electrification.
She was direct about the discipline required to avoid distraction. “What you say no to is as important as what you are saying yes to.”
Conor Quaine, CFO of CitySwift, a Galway-based performance optimisation platform for public transport operators, said that the current environment had, counterintuitively, accelerated demand for his company’s services. “In these uncertain times, there’s nearly more of a demand for things like efficiency. It kind of feeds into our value proposition.”
He said that CFOs need to be the drivers of AI in their organisations rather than leaving that to IT or CIOs. “There are massive efficiency gains, not just in engineering, but right across different departments like finance, HR and marketing.”
From an investors’ perspective Nicola McClafferty, partner with Dublin and London-based Molten Venture which has around €2bn in assets under management, said that there is a meaningful shift in where investment is being concentrated.
“There’s much more of a shift in appetite towards themes around domestic AI dominance, resilience in the economy, supply chain resilience, energy resilience and defence as an investment theme.”
For software businesses, she said, the bar has risen and investors are looking hard at whether AI adoption within a company is a reality or a talking point.
“It’s the businesses that are going to be able to adopt and change and leverage what AI can do at scale, and faster than the others. So we’re looking for that sort of cultural approach. So we’re looking for that sort of cultural approach – how are founders thinking about AI from the top.”
What impresses her are firms where whole teams, not just the engineers, are actively using AI and building on top of them. Molten itself practices what it preaches. “In just the investment team alone we have two junior who code and are building tools weekly that we can all use. It is changing how our workflows are happening right across the board.”
Brian O’Connor, senior investment director at the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, which has committed around €4.5bn to the Irish scaling ecosystem over the past decade, framed the challenge for founders
“The biggest theme I would emphasise is just trying to be aware of being positioned as advantageously as possible to give options.
On the practical question of how to approach investors, O’Connor was concise. “You can’t sell to somebody who can’t buy. Really understand the style and the stage requirements of who you’re talking to.”
Disciplined scenario planning
Seasoned Irish tech veteran and investor Brian Caulfield, chair of Scale Ireland, offered advice to founders and CFOs who are manging multiple planning scenarios simultaneously, pointing out that scenario planning is only as useful as the discipline applied to monitoring it.
“If you have three separate scenarios, you also need real discipline around what signals you are going to monitor to tell you when you need to change scenarios and change plans.”
He added that one of the most common failures he has observed across his career is companies leaving it too late to act when circumstances have already shifted against them.
Caulfield was also pointed about the gap between how investors perceive macro changes and how founders tend to process them. “Investors are watching those macro signals, and they understand that that has a pretty immediate impact on valuations and therefore on entry valuations. Founders frequently reason by analogy. They read a report of some company that has raised a huge round recently at a phenomenal multiple. The only thing is that round probably closed six months ago, and the world is different today.”
On the question of defensibility in an AI era, Caulfield was direct. “Code is no longer a defensible strategy on its own. You need to think carefully about what is our moat, what is going to give us a right to stay in business.” Proprietary data is one answer, he said, but so is positional advantage: being at the centre of a network or controlling a critical interface between a technology and its end user.
JP Morgan’s head of Innovation Economy in Ireland Adrian Mullett picked up on this and argued that Irish companies often have structural advantages that are not always fully appreciated – even by the founders themselves.
“Sometimes we get caught up too much in the technology of today, but the control of the interface is what matters, and we see a lot of quality in the Irish ecosystem around businesses that do that.”
He pointed to XOCEAN’s position between ocean hardware and data consumers, and CitySwift’s role at the centre of operational transport networks as examples of the kind of embedded interface-owning businesses that will prove most durable in these uncertain times.
Mullett acknowledged the transformation of the Irish technology ecosystem over the past decade, crediting Scale Ireland with helping shift the landscape from a fragmented collection of competing lobby groups into a coherent community with genuine policy influence and 800 member companies. “The proof,” he said, “is in the quality of the conversations now happening in rooms like this one.”
-
Bank of Ireland is welcoming new customers every day – funding investments, working capital and expansions across multiple sectors. To learn more, click here
-
For support in challenging times, click here
-
Listen to the ThinkBusiness Podcast for business insights and inspiration. All episodes are here. You can also listen to the Podcast on:
-
Spotify
-
SoundCloud
-
Apple
