Platforms Lure American Cash
Building a business of global scale from a small office on Ranelagh Road (above where Business Plus started out) is no mean achievement, and that’s what former rugby player Conor O’Loughlin managed with Glofox, which was acquired in August 2022 by American peer ABC Fitness Solutions.
Incorporated in 2014, Glofox was originally established as an app development business and then branched into software as a service for the fitness sector. The Glofox platform allows gym owners to manage all aspects of their business.
Together with fellow founding directors Finn Hegarty and Anthony Kelly, O’Loughlin built the SaaS platform into user base spanning 80 countries in 17 languages, according to ABC. Close observers of Glofox say the company’s recurring revenue was tracking $30m when ABC arrived from Little Rock in Arkansas. The purchaser had been acquired in 2018 by US private equity firm Thoma Bravo.
The latest filed accounts for operating company Zappy Ltd disclosed equity invested of €10.2m in December 2019 and start-up losses of €8.6m. Zappy’s cash burn rate was c.€6m per annum through 2019, and the company went back to the funding well for the last time in February 2020, when €7.1m was raised from Gympass in New York. Company filings suggest that O’Loughlin (40) had a 24% stake in Zappy at the time of the exit, with Hegarty on 4.6% and Kelly on 4.1%.
Keyhouse Computing is another platform that found a new owner in 2022. The company, led by Brian Sweeney (61) and Stephen Keogh (48), was established in 1991 and provides cloud and tech solutions for law firms.
In July 2022 it was subsumed by Dye & Durham, a larger Canadian peer.
Keyhouse Computing Ltd did well through the pandemic, booking a net profit of €190,000 after the two directors shared €240,000 in pay and pension remuneration, up 20% on the previous year. The company had 23 people employed in 2020 and trade debtors in December 2020 were €370,000. Net worth at period-end was €356,000, including balance sheet cash of €650,000. Liabilities amounted to €750,000, though €450,000 of that was deferred income.
G‘It is the coronation of a journey that started in Ireland over ten years ago and that now has a global footprint in 55 countries’
overnment spends a fortune trying to marry up academic research with commercial outcomes, but UCD PhD graduate Antonio Ruzzelli did his own thing with Wattics, which he established in 2011. Ruzzelli developed energy management analytics and monitoring software from the Wattics base in the Digital Hub in the Liberties, to measure energy usage in equipment or entire buildings, and provide real-time notifications to managers.
For instance, a hotel would sign up for the Wattics energy management solution to monitor the electricity consumption for air conditioning and extract fans, and gas and water consumption. Using the online Wattics dashboard, the maintenance manager could quickly check the energy consumption for different hotel areas, and then timer settings could be adjusted to match hotel operation.
The salary overhead for eight employees including the founder was €400,000 in 2020, and at the end of that year negative net worth was €237,000. However, Ruzzelli secured his reward in August 2022, when private equity funded EnergyCAP from America bought the firm.
“We are so proud and thrilled to be joining forces with EnergyCAP,” said Ruzzelli (46). “It is the coronation of a journey that started in Ireland over ten years ago and that now has a global footprint in 55 countries.”