Ms Denise Sidhu:

As previously mentioned I am a partner and finance director in Kernel Capital. At Kernel we are acutely aware of the need to realise sustained and balanced regional growth of entrepreneurial hubs across Ireland. We strongly welcome the regional focus of the Government’s Action Plan for Jobs 2015, aimed specifically at investing in and developing our regions, which is key to Ireland’s overall recovery. Every region in Ireland must leverage its unique competitive strengths to create jobs and broader prosperity. Being regionally located should no longer be the impediment it once was to addressing international markets. Connectivity is key and of foremost importance in this regard, particularly for ICT and Internet companies, is the availability of high speed fibre broadband. We welcome the ambition from Government in this regard. This ever-increasing regional potential is borne out by the many great initiatives which are regionally located but which address global markets, including investments we have made in areas such as Kilkenny, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, Tralee, Limerick and Galway. Further developing regional hubs such as these and others is the continuing challenge.

Ultimately, the success of all enterprises is driven by its people and sourcing human capital is a challenge faced by many start-ups across the country. We seek to invest in companies which have an unfair advantage over incumbent competitors; regions, likewise, need to look to their own strengths for their unfair advantage, be it skill clusters, quality of life, natural or geographical factors. Harnessing the collective power of regional stakeholders to drive a region’s individual innovation narrative around its own identity and strengths can then be a powerful enabler.

We have strong regional diversity across our portfolio of 75-plus companies, with over 50% located outside of the Dublin region. Collectively, they employ almost 1,200 people across the island of Ireland, mostly at graduate and postgraduate level and with our assistance, have raised over half a billion euro in equity and debt funding. We have a track record of generating strong returns with divestments including, FeedHenry, Farran Technology, Straatum, Chip sensors and Stokes Bio, which all brought significant foreign direct investment to those respective regions. We are strongly committed to achieving even greater regional spread and travel throughout the country meeting entrepreneurs at local level through our Open Hours events which provide a forum for entrepreneurs to build a relationship with the Kernel Capital team. To date, we have met with hundreds of companies in locations such as Limerick, Cork, Waterford, Galway, Sligo, Letterkenny and Dundalk. We are also heavily involved in the eDIGIREGION FP7 programme. This is a 36 month initiative which aims to increase regional competitiveness via research-driven clusters in the technology domain.

Kernel Capital is the first Irish venture capital firm to be a direct partner of a European framework programme, FP7. This €2.8 million project is led by Waterford Institute of Technology and our Irish partners are IBEC and the South East Regional Authority. Together we are working with our EU partners from Hungary, Spain and Romania, and regional stakeholders in the south east, to develop a joint action plan to boost new international business opportunities for SMEs, drive job creation and long term sustainability of the regions in line with the Action Plan for Jobs 2015.

Our key investors, Bank of Ireland, Enterprise Ireland, The University of Limerick Foundation and the University of Galway Foundation, are exceptionally supportive of the work we do in supporting technology companies across Ireland ensuring we are contributing to the vibrancy of the Irish technology scene. These companies are the beginning of an ecosystem that can eventually lead to larger companies that will create more jobs and fuel the Irish economy. Together we must ensure that we give our country’s leading innovators every chance to succeed.

I thank the Chairman and the members of the committee on behalf of Ms Rimmington, Ms Brady and all the team at Kernel Capital.