SMARTTECH247
Zefone Ltd, which trades as Smarttech247, received €598,000 taxpayer funding in the form of Enterprise Ireland state aid in May 2020. The company is led by Ronan Murphy (42), who cofounded telemarketing and debt recovery business Zevas Communications in 2003 (now owned by co-founder Con Lehane), as well as an earlier iteration of Smarttech. Murphy maintained an early focus on cybersecurity in Smarttech247, which helped it scale internationally as digital security became mainstream.
Smarttech247 is active in Ireland, the UK, Romania, Poland and the US, providing cybersecurity services such as penetration testing, incidence response and cybersecurity awareness training. The company recently announced its intention to add 30 additional staff in Cork.
Murphy also established Getvisibility in 2018. It has developed a product that helps organisations manage and protect unstructured data – i.e. data not held in databases – such as would be found in Word or Excel documents, PDFs, mark-up formats and other file types. The idea is to collect, process and protect data that a business might have lying around on old computer files or hardcopy documents.
Murphy’s co-founder in Getvisibility is Mark Brosnan (40), who ran Xanadu Consultancy, an online betting technology business, for several years. Sure Valley Ventures contributed €750,000 to a €1.25m Getvisibility fundraiser in 2020. In the year to July 2019, operating company Visibility Blockchain Ltd booked a loss of €309,000 and its year-end net deficit was €687,000. The company secured an R&D funding commitment from Enterprise Ireland of €419,000, half of which was received between 2018 and 2019.