About LaunchBox
LaunchBox, Trinity's Student Accelerator, is a summer accelerator run by Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin. LaunchBox is open to teams of Trinity students with an early-stage business. This competitive summer programme provides office space; funding; mentorship; access to alumni, partner and investor networks; and the ideal collaborative environment to launch new startup ventures.
Startups that began at LaunchBox
Previous LaunchBox teams have gone on to yield great success, with various teams securing funding to take their startups to the next stage of development. Alumni startups from the nine LaunchBox programmes to date have collectively raised in excess of €72 million since the programme began in 2013, with over 270 jobs having been created by LaunchBox startups to date.
Artomatix, founded by Eric Risser, took part in LaunchBox 2013 and in late 2019 was sold for over €60m. Social enterprise Foodcloud (Also LaunchBox 2013) has redistributed over 15 million kilograms in food that would otherwise have been wasted. In 2020, FoodCloud co-founder and CEO Iseult Ward won the Social Responsibility Award at the European Tech Women Awards.
Touchtech Payments, founded by Shekinah Adewumi and Niall Hogan, is a Fintech payment startup that took part in LaunchBox 2014. Touchtech was acquired by Stripe in 2019 for an undisclosed sum. More recently, Equine Medirecord (LaunchBox 2017), Change Donations (LaunchBox 2018), and KeepAppy (LaunchBox 2019) Promotion (LaunchBox 2020), and EVE (LaunchBox 2020) are all still operational and going from strength to strength.
The 2022 LaunchBox winners were Ecode, a circular fashion communication platform that empowers consumers to make more informed, sustainable decisions online and in-store; Imprint Esports, software that aims to help esports teams hire more successful players by providing an enterprise platform for analysing performance data; and in joint third place were Givedish and Netsso, an app to help fight food poverty and an encrypted cloud platform for corporate transactions respectively.
Launchbox started in the summer of 2013, initiated by Vinny Cahill, the Dean of Research and supported and funded by a syndicate of Trinity Angels. Now LaunchBox is a crucial strand of Portal.
Trinity Angels
Sean Blanchfield
Founder - Demonware
Brian Caulfield
Partner - DFJ Espirit
Stuart Coulson
Co-founder - Gradient Solutions
Paul Duffy
CEO of The Absolut Company
Joey Mason
Investor Director - Genable
Shane Naughton
CTO - TaxStream LLC
John Ryan
Co-founder of Macrovision
Beate Schuler
Business Angels - Frankfurt