25th Anniversary for Act
This year, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of Act. And as much as our industry, business and the world has changed over those decades, it is amazing how venture capital fundamentals remain consistent throughout cycles. The way we practice investing and add value in the industry has evolved over time, but our core principles have remained constant since 1994.
Team & Principles
We’ve built our team and our culture around these principles. To encourage transparency & deep understanding, and by putting the team ahead of the individual, we aim to develop great investors from within our firm. Acting on principles, is evidenced by the fact that our partners have been successfully investing together as a team for over 2 decades. Where all three partners started as associates, eventually growing into their partner roles.
We value teamwork and true expertise over showmanship. Our team is small, but our expertise and knowledge is diverse. Our global network is vast, having being built over decades of hard lessons learned, goals achieved and relationships formed.
Working as a team is central to our success, and one way this is reflected is in our preparation and our focus. This means doing the ground work and developing deep understandings on current technology and market dynamics, and sharing them across our team. Our preparation has led us to find innovative technology companies led by extraordinary teams.
Our focus and ability to take a company from seed to exit enables us to build strong trusted relationships with our founders and focus on what really matters, filter the noise and use our expertise to guide and support these founders and teams to build daring companies.
Diligence & Preparation
In an ever changing industry, our primary focus on prepared and diligent investing enables us to have firm conviction to back extraordinary teams and companies in the very earliest stages in their journeys. Over the last decade, Act has been Ireland’s most active VC investor; with 53 new investments and 43 exits.
– Raised 5 funds totaling €487m
– Leveraged a further €1.2 billion investment from our international network
– Receive 1000+ submissions per year
– Evaluate 200+ investment opportunities annually
Our primary objective is to be the first and lead investor in our companies, that takes pro active, supportive roles with founders, and work diligently side-by-side to build incredible businesses. To remain with them along the journey from seed to exit, by providing investment, support and 20 years of expertise of travelling this journey again and again.
Innovation In Ireland
One of our fund objectives is the development of innovation in Ireland. Investing here is the focal point of our strategy. Act through the support of AIB, Enterprise Ireland, Ireland Strategic Investment Fund and the European Investment Fund has been given the ability to combine a strong investment capacity with vital company building expertise that will directly develop an indigenous industry of innovative technology companies with global reach— we firmly believe that we are only at the initial phase of Ireland’s innovation culture and are here to support the next wave of talented young innovators.
With the same breath we know we must also look beyond Ireland in a world that is becoming more local and accessible, and the explosion of technology startups around the world, has provided us more opportunities to support talented technology founders. We must strive to support the growth of female founders to find another talent pool of entrepreneurs, that are currently misrepresented. With a mandate to invest in Europe and US companies seeking and Irish EMEA HQ, we can add considerable expertise to both early European startups and US companies seeking local expertise.
A hard act to follow : to the next 25
We are more optimistic than ever about the growth of technology in our lives over the next 25 years. In the last 12 months we added two new members to our investment team; Andrew & Vaibhav, had a face lift with a new brand identity and continue to evolve as a firm and team.
Beyond our team, our ability to continually support exceptional founders and companies is largely due to our limited partners, many of whom have supported us for over 20 years. Thank you. We deeply appreciate the opportunity to implement your objectives, and are always conscious and aware of the trust and responsibility that you’ve placed upon us.
Last but not least…we are indebted to the talented and daring teams we have partnered with over the last 25 years, who do the impossible when others doubt, who work tirelessly to build extraordinary companies from an idea. Thank you.
