Walmart, the US retail giant behemoth, has operated a business in Dublin since 2017, which at its peak last year employed almost 100 people. This month, however, the $400 billion valued retailer is quietly closing the office, which focuses on data science and software development.

The office was originally home to Jet.com, an e-commerce platform co-founded by the Irish businessman Mike Hanrahan and the Wexford entrepreneur played an important role in the decision to locate the business in Dublin.

Walmart acquired Jet.com for $3 billion in 2016, and later set up its Walmart Labs and Intelligent Retail Lab in the Dublin office, leading to it hiring even more staff. Hanrahan is the chief executive of this important unit within Walmart, which is headquartered in New Jersey in the US.

The decision by Walmart to close its Dublin office follows a decision earlier this year to centralise its data science and analytics operations in its core market of North America.

This move came after Walmart decided to sell its majority stake in British grocery chain Asda to EG Group, the British petrol forecourt operator founded by Mohsin and Zuber Issa, and British private equity firm TDR Capital for $8.79 billion.

Some of the engineering team based in Dublin are expected to relocate to North America, but many of them are in the process of being hired by other multinationals in Ireland.

Irish property fund IPUT pre-let Walmart’s Dublin office at 40 Molesworth Street in Dublin 2 at an annual rent of €1.8 million. This equates to €60 a square foot for the high-end office space, which once housed the European Union in Ireland. A spokesperson for Walmart did not respond to a request for comment.

Who is Mike Hanrahan?

Mike Hanrahan is one of Ireland’s most successful technology entrepreneurs, but he tends to keep a low profile. A former investment banker with Credit Suisse, he moved to New Jersey in the middle of the financial crash to take a chance in the rather more unglamorous world of selling nappies. Originally the business he worked for was called Diapers.com, a business founded by his friend Marc Lore.

In 2009 they renamed the business Quidsi and expanded its product range before selling it the next year to Amazon for $545 million. Hanrahan had enough money to take a couple of years off work, and he used the period to spend time with his family and plot his next start-up.

This emerged in 2014 as Jet.com, which he co-founded with Lore and another friend called Nate Faust. The idea behind Jet.com was that the more consumers bought online, the lower the price per item they had to pay. Jet.com raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors including Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital and Accel Partners and the site officially launched in 2015. It was acquired by Walmart for $3 billion in 2016 as part of its plan to fight off Amazon.

In May 2020, Walmart said it was discontinuing the Jet.com website. Walmart chief executive Doug McMillon said however the acquisition had changed the way Walmart thought about and used data, crediting the acquisition for “jump-starting” the progress it has made selling online. In a 2017 interview with The Irish Times, Hanrahan declined to say how much he had made along the way in business.

On a corporate video on Walmart’s website, Hanrahan is central to explaining how AI and other technology is used by Walmart to deliver better service to their millions of customers in-store, ultimately allowing them to sell more. “AI is going to be as transformative to retail as e-commerce was. We want to make sure Walmart is at the vanguard of that, and that we are leading the charge,” Hanrahan explains.