Mr. Nick Ashmore:

Stripe is an outlier and an astonishing company. The fact that it has situated its second headquarters globally here in Ireland is a very strong endorsement of the Irish ecosystem and the opportunity and talent that are available here. Stripe is a key partner with us and we have made an investment with the company. We are finding that to be a very value added relationship in terms of other areas that we are working on, whether it is supporting the innovation ecosystem or looking at different types of climate investing.

The emergence of what we call unicorns, companies with valuations north of €1 billion, has been very strong in Ireland over the last two or three years. We are not at the level, given the size of the economy, of the UK, but certainly across Europe we are pretty competitive.

Wayflyer is a good example of a company that is in a similar adjacent space to Stripe and works with Stripe. Wayflyer has grown enormously quickly and been able to tap into talent and access the resources it has needed to grow very quickly. Wayflyer will continue to be a support for other tech-style ops as well because it provides funding to businesses that are selling online. We see these companies emerging but, to Mr. Caulfield's point, we are not in the same ecosystem as, say, Silicon Valley had ten years ago. We are closer to that now but there are fundamental differences.

On the lessons learned from the collapse of SVB, it is an apposite lesson for any sector not to be reliant on one institution. Certainly that is a hard lesson the US tech scene is experiencing right now, and it will place a cloud over venture capital and tech in the US for the next period. However, it has proven to be a very resilient business over time and there are always new innovations coming through. The excitement around artificial intelligence at the moment is very tangible evidence of that, despite all the other dysfunction going on around it, there is a huge wave of new investment coming into that area given the new opportunities that are emerging.

SVB is an important lender in the Irish market, with the vast majority of it coming out of London, partly through the partnership that we have had as ISIF with SVB over the past ten years. The good news is that that business has been sold and passed over to HSBC. We are hopeful and engaging with HSBC to see where it is going to go from here with that business. That lending capacity has not been lost to the Irish market, which is solid news. Also, we have not seen Irish tech companies as reliant on SVB for banking services in terms of current account, deposit accounts, trading and other things. They are much more tapped into the Irish banking infrastructure.

I will pass over to Dr. Saunders to talk about the choice of exits and what drives those.