Mr. Brian Caulfield:

I have spent almost 30 years in this sector, as a founder, investor and mentor for start-ups. I co-founded Scale Ireland to ensure the community had an organisation to support, promote and represent it as the issues facing the sector are very different from the general SME sector, as Ms Fitzgerald outlined. The indigenous tech sector is also a highly diverse sector with companies operating in enterprise solutions, fintech, e-commerce, medtech, cleantech and agtech, among others.

Scale Ireland has welcomed a number of significant policy discussions on the sector in recent years. All recognise that tech innovation will be an important driver of our economic growth and resilience. We strongly welcome the targets set for our sector in the Government's White Paper on enterprise. These targets include a 50% increase in the number of large Irish exporting companies by 2030 and a 20% increase in the number of high-potential start-ups by 2024.

It is not surprising, given the challenging investment landscape internationally, that the most significant issue facing startups is securing finance. Scale Ireland is working with its sectoral partners in the Alliance for Innovation to make further proposals to address this deficit.

Scale Ireland supports and acknowledges the considerable investment of public money through Enterprise Ireland and ISIF, as well as State support for regional enterprise hubs and innovation in the third-level sector. We also support the major European initiatives to support startups, including the European Commission's startup nations standard. These initiatives acknowledge the increasing role of tech startups in scaling companies to the future of Europe and they also set out roadmaps on how to achieve this in terms of best practice regarding setting up a business, finance, visas, share options, red tape, diversity, regulation and supporting enterprise in our regions and in our third-level institutions.

Ireland performs reasonably well in international comparison surveys, though there is increased competition in this sector across the EU and globally, which suggests there is no room for complacency. We also welcome the new €90 million Irish Innovation Seed Fund, IISF, programme, supported by Enterprise Ireland, the European Investment Bank, EIB, and ISIF. Enterprise Ireland's new Pre-Seed Start Fund has also been widely welcomed by the sector. We believe it will play an important role supporting early-stage startups. The employment investment incentive scheme is another important source of scaling in capital. However, the report of the Commission on Taxation and Welfare has detailed the complexity of this scheme. We believe further changes are needed, such as the introduction of capital gains tax, CGT, loss relief and changes to the limits and periods of qualifying investments that would make it more attractive to investors. We face strong competition from the UK here.

There is also a lack of funding in the €3 million to €10 million space for scaling companies. We will make proposals in advance of the budget on this. The report of the Commission on Taxation and Welfare also makes a number of interesting proposals around the entrepreneur relief, specifically with regard to making it available to a wider pool of investors, including individual investors. The White Paper contains a commitment to a wider review of CGT and we look forward to participating in that review. Separately, Scale Ireland has also proposed a new tax credit-type scheme to incentivise companies to hire people who have lost their jobs recently. We believe there is an opportunity to help these workers to continue to make a valuable contribution to Ireland's economic success and there is considerable merit in assisting those who have been impacted by the recent redundancy announcements to direct their skills and experiences into the indigenous tech startup sector.

Finally, our recent survey suggested almost 70% of startups do not have a sustainability plan, and we have consistently sought to address this. Sustainability is becoming an increasingly important metric for investors and indeed climate tech is one of the fastest growing sectors. We are currently working on new proposals to address this.

Ms Fitzgerald and I look forward to discussing these important issues with the committee. We again thank the Cathaoirleach and members of the committee for the invitation to meet with it today.