Maeve Kneafsey is surrounded by stacks of unusual artwork and prints. Her house is being renovated and is consequently slightly disorientated. In the corner of the sitting room is a framed print of a Sex Pistols album cover. On the shelf is an encased purple jellyfish ornament that glitters in the light.

While her photographs for this piece are being taken, she speaks about how the Stag’s Head pub in Dublin’s city centre still does a good toasted cheese sandwich. It is clear Kneafsey has an eclectic set of interests. She is also a serial entrepreneur and a pioneer for female led tech businesses.

Kneafsey has founded a string of successful companies. For her latest play, he has teamed up with Brenda Jordan to create Saas business CloudKPI. the early signs are encouraging – a string of deals are in the pipeline, and the firm is set to poised to close a €1 million funding round.

Kneafsey and her business partner Brenda Jordan founded CloudKPI, a Software as a Service (Saas) company, in 2016. Already, they are winning plaudits and battling convention.

The industry is notorious for harbouring ageist attitudes and being biased towards entrepreneurs south of 35. Along with this, the tech industry is still highly male dominated. A report from the Silicon Valley Bank showed only 56 per cent of start-ups have at least one woman in an executive position, and just 40 per cent have at least one woman on the board of directors.

This means that approximately half of all start-ups in the US, the UK, China and Canada have no women on their leadership teams. 

So, what does Kneafsey make of the male-dominated tech boardrooms? “It’s a tricky one,” she says. “All you have to do is look at the numbers.

“The fact is that of all the money that goes into tech in terms of VC money only 2 per cent goes to female founded tech companies,” she said, adding that of her company’s investors are male. 

These businesswomen are challenging these norms in tech and grabbing the foreign interest especially after becoming the only European winners of the $500,000 cash prize from the Connecticut Innovations VentureClash competition.

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Jordan, an accountant by trade, initially created CloudKPI to deliver key performance and financial metrics for small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs).

It was when, in 2015, she met Kneafsey while attending Going for Growth, an initiative by Enterprise Ireland to support women in business, that they realised that they had the same ideas when it came to business. 

“We had a lot in common in what we were bringing to market but had different perspectives,” said Jordan. 

Before collaborating with Jordan, Kneafsey had founded two digital marketing agencies. Amas, which was sold in 2003, and Elucidate, Ireland’s first digital strategy and marketing agency, which she left in 2015. The Trinity graduate was also the founder and CEO of FinTech SaaS solution Marketfinder. 

Kneafsey was looking at ways that would make it easier for companies to consolidate and formulate data in a cost efficient way for businesses so they know where their customers are coming from. Both women wanted to deliver insights for business. They pooled their expertise together to make CloudKPI the business to business (B2B) Saas company it is today.

Kneafsey said that Jordan could see that “the data she was producing was going to become a commodity and was going to become automated”.

“Both of us know data is vital but how do we automate it so that we give something of real value,” said Kneafsey.

Building the business

SaaS became their primary focus. This sector creates specific software out of online data which they then license out (usually to other businesses) to help performance. There is also little cost to setting up a SaaS company as it’s all cloud based and tangibles such as office spaces and equipment are not vital for the business to thrive. This also means that the Saas sector is growing rapidly with a lot of opportunity within it. 

One of the crucial elements to creating a successful SaaS business is having a target market. This is something Kneafsey was acutely aware of, especially as there is so much noise and a range of SaaS options for businesses to use. 

“If you try and make something for everybody, you’re probably not going to have something of real value,” she said. 

“We understood that I could bring my insights and experience around sales and business and marketing metrics and Brenda could bring her insights around revenue and financial metrics. Together that gave you a much bigger and more complete picture of your business,” said Kneafsey.

They decided to go to San Francisco where many leaders in tech were based. They wanted to find out if their skills could solve a problem that exists for market within the SaaS community. 

They went out to the State’s with the Enterprise Ireland Access Silicon Valley programme, and were then accepted into Plug and Play, the biggest accelerator programme in the world. 

Although it’s early days for CloudKPI, Kneafsey is still looking to the future with SaaS particularly around the use of personal and business data.

“If you flip it and say what scenario in business would someone give away their business data.”

“There is real opportunity in data co-opping, where people opt in to enable you to use their anonymised data customer and business data if it means they get something back that’s really valuable to them,” she said. 

Social media was the example she gave for this. People give away their personal details such as email, photos and others to gain access to a social media site. 

“If you flip it and say what scenario in business would someone give away their business data,” said Kneafsey. 

The businesswoman emphasised the importance of making the data anonymous to protect customers, while simultaneously making data into a type of currency you can use to get something else of value. 

CloudKPI’s Current Status

Kneafsey and Jordan have raised close to €1 million in funding for the business. “You’re never there until everything’s signed. Assuming everything goes as planned, yes we’re nearly there,” she said about the funding. 

Once the round is completed, the focus is on development in Ireland for CloudKPI. Many of their team is in their office in San Francisco which they aim to maintain and still work from also. However, they want to expand in North America as well. 

“A good chunk of our customers are North American. Our plan is to have offices in North America. Particularly in the east coast because that means we can travel both to the west coast and to Ireland without it being a complete nightmare,” she said. 

“It’s taken us two years to get here but we are here.”

They have already secured some clients which are in the “high growth phase as a Saas company” and they also have some in the earlier stage of business. Kneafsey said the company is redirecting itself now though towards mid-sized companies. 

“As our products got more sophisticated we can do a lot more for them,” she said. 

Their customers are predominantly Saas companies in the US but they also have a couple of large strategic consultancy firms that work with SaaS.

Kneafsey and Jordan are in the middle of sealing lucrative deals for their company which sunder wraps. 

“It’s the first time we’ve had the product in a state where the amount of work we have to do to onboard somebody in terms of professional services is very limited,” said Kneafsey. “It’s taken us two years to get here but we are here.”