Movidius cashes in

GREAT news for the founders of Irish chip maker Movidius. It has been a long hard road for them over the last ten years, culminating in a €300m to €350m sale of the company to Intel.

They get a just reward, a great shareholder and they don’t have to suffer the distraction of endless funding rounds.

But it is a little bit of a pity that they had to sell. Movidius was tipped to become the next unicorn or billion dollar valued tech company. The sale takes them out of that particular hunt.

The share register shows a raft of equity funds and tech entrepreneur investors from Ireland and Belgium to California and the British Virgin Islands.

The state ended up with around 12pc of the company through investments made by Enterprise Ireland and partners of the Irish Strategic Investment Fund, who only arrived to the party in 2015.

Some of that equity came quite late in the day and represents a pretty good financial turnaround for its investors.

The only state investor who appears to have taken a real risk and suffered along the hard road with the Movidius founders was Enterprise Ireland. The state agency has been chipping in money to back the company since 2007.

Perhaps Movidius will have a much longer and brighter future under the wing of Intel, especially given the fate of all our previous unicorns in the tech sector — from Baltimore to Trintech.

Movidius management were paying staff wages from their own personal funds just a few years ago as things got very tough. Now they have secured the future of the company and its Irish jobs.

We will just have to wait a bit longer for that endangered species — the Irish unicorn.