“Exponential growth is a term often used by start-ups in pitch decks, but rarely achieved. Dublin-headquartered Wayflyer, however, is among that rare breed.”

So began Tom’s first article on Wayflyer back in November 2020. The e-commerce financier had only started trading that April, but by the time Tom sat down with its chief executive and co-founder Aidan Corbett, the fledgling start-up was already lending $12 million a month. 

Within the industry, there was an undeniable buzz about the company; about is rapid growth, about its disruptive business model, and about the sheer enormity of its potential. QED Investors had just backed the business. At that time, the venture capital firm had a roster of 13 unicorns. Even then, there was a feeling that Wayflyer could one day join that list of tech start-ups valued at more than $1 billion. 

Tom sat down with the company again in September 2021. We don’t usually do follow-up interviews so quickly, but the company’s growth in the intervening period was too striking to ignore. It was now lending $75 million a month and had closed its $76 million series A round while securing debt facilities of $100 million.

It was fast closing in on unicorn status, something Tom confirmed two months later when he revealed an impending funding round would value the business at more than $1.5 billion.

The deal was confirmed last week when it raised a further $150 million. It is not Ireland’s first unicorn. Indeed, as Sean commented in his column on Ireland’s technology industry last week, we have got two in the past two weeks, something he said highlighted the health of the wider tech ecosystem here:

“If you’re seeing a lot of start-ups valued at $1 billion or more, it means there are lots of great smaller companies ideas and talent knocking about.”

However, Wayflyer is certainly the first to achieve the status in just 20 months of trading. It was a staggering achievement for the company, its founders, and its early backers.

Last week, Tom sat down with both Corbett and his co-founder Jack Pierse to talk about the deal, the journey, and the company’s plans for future expansion.

However, the interview was also littered with valuable nuggets and pieces of advice for other start-ups and founders who want to scale their businesses. 


Here are five things I took away from the interview: 

1.    Chose the right VC
Clearly, not every business will have the luxury to handpick the venture capital firm of their choice. But Wayflyer sought to secure backing from a fund that matched their ambition and the strategy.  When QED invested in the business in 2020, it had backed 13 unicorns. Today, that number of 24. And, when Wayflyer was working on its latest raise, QED used its network to bring the right funds in at the right valuation. It did a lot of work on behalf of the business. 

“Our existing VCs were keeping us in the loop about how much interest there is, where the market is at. If you have really good VCs, they should set up the new round for you,” Corbett said.

Likewise, the company sought to ensure that its new backers were going to bring something to the business other than money. JP Morgan, for example, backed the round. There is a synergy to the partnership.

After all, the Irish start-up matches debt with its own equity and then lends its funds to e-commerce firms. JP Morgan, meanwhile, raises a lot of debt and has linkages to lots of e-commerce platforms. 

2.    The power of the network
Jack Pierse previously worked with the entrepreneur and investor Liam Casey both in San Francisco and Ireland in his hardware accelerator Highway1. When it was raising its most recent round, Casey, a seed investor in Wayflyer, made the introduction to JP Morgan. Madrone Capital Partners, the investment company of the Walton family who founded Walmart, also backed the round. It too was introduced by an existing investor. 

QED, meanwhile, introduced Tom Stafford, a Trinity College graduate who is a partner with DST Global, a $50 billion fund that was an early backer of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Airbnb, Spotify, and Alibaba.

According to Corbett, “We take the endorsements of our VCs very seriously and that is where a lot of the deal flow comes from.”

3.    Go global early
In its early days, Corbett admits that he was not sure if Wayflyer was ready to go international, but Pierse pushed for it. So, the business launched in Britain within two months after it went live, and it was in the United States by month three. It turned out to be a masterstroke and escalated the company’s growth. Corbett warns staying in Europe too long meant processes got embedded and that can make it harder to go to the US.

“Go to the United States from day one and start selling there,” he says. “It is such an amazing place to do business.”

4.    Seed capital matters
The founders said that having a network of investors across the US, Britain and Europe at the start made it easier to go international sooner. “I am not sure it is a great idea for lawyers and accountants to become seed investors to take advantage of tax breaks,” Corbett says. “The best seed investors are typically former founders like Liam Casey who know what it is like to be in a start-up and that you can lose all your money.

5.    Founder dynamics
Aidan Corbett is not a newcomer to the Irish tech scene. Now 38, he worked as a junior researcher in the ill-fated MediaLab Europe, and put in stints in the Department of Communications, McKinsey, and NTR. In 2016, he co-founded Conjura, a digital analytics company that helps companies measure the impact of their digital spend on revenue.

He met jack Pierse in 2019. He was in his mid-twenties and had an idea for a spin-out company that would lend to e-commerce companies but have an analytics engine. As Tom put it, “the combination of Corbett’s seasoned experience and Pierse’s confidence in Wayflyer’s ability to go international proved a winning one”.

*****

Elsewhere last week, Stephen interviewed Bobby Healy, who was heavily involved in building one of Ireland’s first unicorns, CarTrawler. Healy left long before the valuation plummeted as a result of Covid and is now on a mission to build a worldwide drone delivery service. It was a fascinating interview that went way beyond his plans for Manna, and delved into society, the future and the nature of technological advancement. Healy also had some provocative thoughts on the climate for indigenous businesses: 

“FDI companies are able to get access to better grants and better commercial opportunities via the IDA than we’re able to get from Enterprise Ireland, and the reason, the technical reason that Enterprise Ireland can’t help us in the way the IDA helps FDI companies is illegal state aid rules. That’s what gets thrown to me is Europe is the illegal state aid rule so there can’t be any handouts, but we can help Apple and Amazon all day long. We can give them headcount grants or all sorts of things, right? But we can’t do that for indigenous companies. And maybe that’s a European policy problem. I don’t know.”

In a south Dublin suburb, a row is escalating between Ardstone, a property firm that builds Strategic Housing Developments, and a local community group that raises funds online to stop them from being built in the area. Tom had the story. 

Six years on from founding CitySwift, Brian O’Rourke and Alan Farrelly explained how they developed AI to optimise bus fleets, sold it to the UK’s major operators and are now going international – having raised funds from A-list investors including Ryanair’s founding family along the way.

Russian state-owned VTB Bank has spent the past seven years moving assets around Europe in the face of sanctions and Brexit. An investigation by The Currency revealed that its €3 billion commodities business has landed in Ireland – at least on paper. 

Two years ago, I wrote about one of the most Byzantine schemes used to lower tax bills – requiring a string of interrelated companies, various put and call options and the deliberate impairment of asset values on German government bonds. Last week, I was able to report the individuals who had used it, the firm who had marketed it, and why the High Court ruled it was within the law.