DigiTally served top prize at NDRC Portershed investor showcase

Food business management platform impresses with blend of acumen and innovation

Trade

Patrick McDermott and Artur Leonowicz, DigiTally

Galway start-up DigiTally took home the top prize of €30,000 in follow-on investment at the NDRC Portershed investor showcase today.

DigiTally, founded by Patrick McDermott and Artur Leonowicz, is a software platform that enables management of multi-site food businesses to make faster decisions and improve gross margins through using a single, tailored dashboard to manage the sales cycle of fresh, perishable produce.

DigiTally saw off competition from six businesses covering industries such as retail, healthcare, green energy and tourism.

“In this third accelerator programme at PorterShed, we saw the strongest cohort to date. Standards were very high,” said Ben Hurley, CEO of NDRC and one of the five investors acting as judges at the Investor Showcase.

“DigiTally was chosen for a number of reasons. It is very close to market, and it is very proximate to scaling. It is ready for investment today, in that we can see the impact that immediate investment would have on the company. It’s a product-driven business that can scale, and it operates in an area that has great scope for technological solutions to problems. This latter point is made clear by the fact that DigiTally is already solving acute problems within the fresh produce industry.”

The other judges on the day were Enterprise Ireland’s Gillian Slattery, Niamh Sterling of HBAN, Sure Valley Ventures’ Barry Downes and Dermot Berkery, of Delta Partners.

Based in the PorterShed in Eyre Square, Galway, this initiative is a collaboration from Enterprise Ireland, NDRC and GCID (Galway City Innovation District) and aims to drive the growth of digital startups nationally.

“Congratulations to DigiTally. We look forward to helping this exciting business grow to greater heights in the coming months and years,” said Maurice O’Gorman, GCID Chairman.

This was the third NDRC at PorterShed accelerator programme, having previously emerged as a partnership under Enterprise Ireland’s Accelerator Development Scheme, beginning in 2017.

Since then, the 22 companies that have come through the programmes have secured approximately €1 million in follow-on investment.

Previous investor showcase winners include Appraisee, which provides digital appraisal software used by car dealerships; and PlanDomino, a productivity tool designed for the laboratory market.

TechCentral Reporters

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