This story was originally published here, and authored by Shay Garvey, Partner @Frontline

For pretty much the last decade, the technology start-up ecosystem has been awash with capital. This is partly as a result of an explosion of companies developing groundbreaking technologies that promise major growth for investors.

On the supply side, there has been a huge weight of capital chasing yield at any price in a close to zero interest rate environment. …

Celebrating Pointy

I first got introduced to Mark in 2012 by his college friend Lucinda, whom I worked with at the time.

We kept in touch and in 2014, Mark told me about his plans for Pointy. The vision at the time was to make all products in physical stores searchable.

Indexing the worlds physical products was an ambitious task. It was also a known problem that many had tried to solve, and failed.

I had done due diligence on a number of those companies during 2010–2013 which usually took the same approach — integrate with hundreds of point of sales systems. …

A Speedinvest & Frontline collaboration: The German-speaking startup and VC ecosystem

In 2017, Thomas Olszewski wrote: “The highest level of international VC participation in Europe has fueled the growth of dozens of German-born, global, and European champions” as the opening line to Startups and VC in Germany, 2017 — a collaboration with Speedinvest and Point Nine Capital.

As the region has continued to evolve, we’ve decided an update to our findings was in order. Voila; we’re releasing the new and updated State of the Startup & Venture Capital Landscape in DACH, 2018 edition — where we have extended our scope from Germany to factor in the increased importance of other hubs in the German-speaking ecosystem. …

#BeMyFrontline

An ode to the invincible entrepreneurs we work with everyday. Because, why not?

#ValentinesDay2018

From KITTI to KITT
understand.ai delivers training data for Level-5 automated vehicles

No one can have missed the rise to power of artificial intelligence in the last couple of years and in particular the huge strides made in machine learning. The impact of this is being felt across many different industries, but perhaps none more-so than the automotive sector. OK, this is a cliche, but I was a huge fan of Knight Rider in my younger days (some time ago now!). KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand) was the stuff of science fiction, a cool Pontiac Firebird with its wonderfully British butler-like AI personality and self-driving capabilities (and of course the awesome strobing red light on the front). …

The General Data Protection Regulation will come into force on May 25th, 2018. This wide sweeping legislation will materially impact all businesses in terms of how they collect and process personal data. Additionally, and in the case of SaaS businesses, it will also impact how customer data is specifically stored and handled.

To help our entrepreneurs better understand and prepare for the legislation, we invited Aoife Sexton, Co-Founder of Frontier Privacy, to address some of the more significant changes being brought about by the GDPR - and to provide specific guidance on key steps that data controllers & data processors should take to ensure compliance come May. …

Steve Collins, Partner, Frontline Ventures

I had the opportunity to drop into Irish Independent podcast studios for a chat about all things technical with one of Ireland’s best minds in tech journalism. I’ve been a fan of Adrian’s for a long time. He’s consistently delivered quality news and opinion on the latest hot topics in technology for nearly fifteen years now. In this podcast, we chat mostly about the latest news from the CES show and drift into deeper discussions about driverless cars, augmented reality, landing people on mars and artificial intelligence. It all made sense at the time!

I also get the chance to reminisce a little on the success of Havok (a company I co-founded with Hugh Reynolds) and how a small Irish technology company became a global game industry brand, still recognised by gamers all over the world. There’s an old adage in the movie business, that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to the fun the crew had in making it. Hope that’s not true of podcasts! …

I had the opportunity to drop into Irish Independent podcast studios for a chat about all things technical with one of Ireland’s best minds in tech journalism! I’ve been a fan of Adrian’s for a long time. He’s consistently delivered quality news and opinion on the latest hot topics in technology for nearly fifteen years now. In this podcast, we chat mostly about the latest news from the CES show and drift into deeper discussions about driverless cars, augmented reality, landing people on mars and artificial intelligence. It all made sense at the time!

I also get the chance to reminisce a little on the success of Havok (a company I co-founded with Hugh Reynolds) and how a small Irish technology company became a global game industry brand, still recognised by gamers all over the world. There’s an old adage in the movie business, that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to the fun the crew had in making it. Hope that’s not true of podcasts! …