Ireland’s Dogpatch Lab-run NDRC takes on Techstars London and YCombinator, presents first demo day

If you’ve been paying attention, Ireland’s NDRC has (maybe not so) quietly been taking on some of the biggest players in the biz, even adopting some of their founder-friendly terms, and is now halfway through the first 6-month programme since being taken over by one of Dublin’s favourite startup champions, Dogpatch Labs.

Having just concluded their demo day, the cohort of 11 Irish, Swedish, and UK-based startups that include former Strip, Intercom, and Zalando veterans have showcased their progress to an enthusiastic audience.

Of note,

• GDPR and CCPA compliance automator Dataships announced a $3 million seed funding round via Urban Innovation Fund, Lavrock Ventures, and Irish billionaire Tony Smurfit.
  • Co-founder Michal Storan commented, “Between GDPR, cookies and major forces such as Google and Apple constantly changing the rules of engagement, data privacy compliance has become unnecessarily confusing for business owners and marketers. We’re here to unravel all of this and show companies the happy path of compliance.”
• Hyper-personalized video and gifs sales tool Vidu has attracted the attention and investment from unicorn Intercom’s co-founders.
• Guardara which focuses on fuzz testing, a software testing technique for discovering coding errors and security loopholes, has successfully identified a yet-to-be-spotted ‘zero day’ vulnerability in an open-source project. A rarity by any stretch of the imagination.
• Robotify, which allows students to control the latest robots to learn and enhance coding skills with software, has attracted a rather significant new customer, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak via his WozEd company.
• Hiking trails locator Hiiker has brought on Roz Purcell (500,000+instagram followers) as Global Head of Community and tripled its user base to 170,000 hikers since starting the accelerator.
• Virtual team builder Orcadia has garnered the early access attention of Google, Salesforce, and Amazon.
• Drinks Industry sales intelligence platform Gain Grain has signed on 5 paying customers during a closed beta, two of which are the largest distilleries in Virginia

“Typically top early-stage Irish founders would have a preference for Techstars London or YCombinator. With this new accelerator, we’re seeing top Irish talent stay and international founders come to Ireland,” commented Dogpatch Labs CEO Patrick Walsh.

Again, the NDRC demo day represents only the halfway mark for this cohort, as their now have another 3 months to focus on closing funding rounds, hiring needed staff, and the all-important term sheets, including NDRC’s variant of YCombinator’s popular Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) agreement.

“We made our version of the YC SAFE freely available, as SAFEs are founder-friendly with simple to understand terms and conditions. Our hope is that by doing the work on the behalf of the ecosystem, every entrepreneur in Ireland can benefit,” concluded Walsh.